Earlier this year, I read a wonderful book called "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" which is sort of a half-personal, half-serious account of one woman's struggles with gendered toys while trying to raise her daughter to be strong, independent, and happy. I enjoyed the book immensely, and I recommend it highly. Today's post is also about genderessentialism and gendered toys and gender assumptions and a lot of other gendery things in the Chronicles of Narnia. And so I want to make some disclaimers first.
I know from internet experience that it is sometimes hard to parse the difference between "this passage is gender essentialist and gender essentialism is bad" and "this passage is gender essentialist and therefore the author is bad". I'm also aware that any time any piece of literature written before [insert current year] is criticized for having gender essentialist passages, someone pops up to helpfully point out that the author can't possibly be at fault because the author was born before [insert current year] and therefore was a product of a sexist society and unable to form alternate opinions. I'm sympathetic to this view, to a point, although I realize my hilarious tongue-in-cheek description sounds like I'm not. So I want to completely, 100% clarify going in that this is not meant to be a "C.S. Lewis sucks!" post, so much as a "gosh, gender essentialism sure is invasive and damaging and we're all highly susceptible to it" post.

So, with that in mind, let's talk about the Beavers.

NOW WE MUST GO BACK TO MR. AND Mrs. Beaver and the three other children. As soon as Mr. Beaver said, "There's no time to lose," everyone began bundling themselves into coats, except Mrs. Beaver, who started picking up sacks and laying them on the table and said: "Now, Mr. Beaver, just reach down that ham. And here's a packet of tea, and there's sugar, and some matches. And if someone will get two or three loaves out of the crock over there in the corner." "What are you doing, Mrs. Beaver?" exclaimed Susan. "Packing a load for each of us, dearie," said Mrs. Beaver very coolly. "You didn't think we'd set out on a journey with nothing to eat, did you?" [...] "Get along with you all," said his wife. "Think it over, Mr. Beaver. She can't be here for quarter of an hour at least."

Now, I like sensible fantasy characters. One of the reasons I fell head-over-heels for the "His Dark Materials" trilogy was the fact that the adults were sensible, logical, and actually involved the children in key discussions with the belief that, yeah, it's a shame to ruin childhood innocence with ugly facts but when there's a very good chance their lives will depend on this information, it's up to an adult to get over the "innocent child" fantasy and start educating them. How refreshingly novel in a YA book!

So I want to like Mrs. Beaver. She's packing food and not just helping everyone run around like a chicken with their head cut off. How can I not like that? The problem is that I still somewhat feel like Mr. Beaver and Mrs. Beaver are not thoroughly characterized characters, and I additionally feel that a lot of their characterization is either heavily gendered or just a little too whimsical.

Part of the problem, of course, is Mrs. Beaver's insistence that she knows the future. Mrs. Beaver's precise predictions rub me up the wrong way entirely, from her "not if I know her" predictions of the behavior of a woman she most definitely does not know, apparently has never met, and knows precious little about, to her now perfect timing of how long it will take the Witch and the Secret Police to get to their house, considering that no one even knows precisely when Edmund left the house. But no, it'll take at least another 15 minutes for the Witch to get there, because Mrs. Beaver says so. Never mind that packing up five bundles of food, drink, and clothing would likely take more than 15 minutes plus the fact that you're shaving things pretty close even with a full 15 minute lead.

Beyond the issue of Mrs. Beaver's self-insisted clairvoyance is the feeling that this reinforces the Sensible Working Class vibe that I get from the Beavers. Mrs. Beaver's sense strikes me as almost sense for the sake of sense, rather than being meaningful in itself. By which I mean that it might well make sense to take stock of things prior to rushing off into the snow with the Secret Police after you, but... the Stone Table isn't exactly miles and miles away. The whole party will make it there in less than 24-hours time, and that's at a leisurely stroll (and Susan gets a blister). In which case, maybe they don't need five full bundles of food, drink, and extra socks. "Sense" should serve a meaningful end, otherwise it's just a compulsion.

"Well, I'm nearly ready now," answered Mrs. Beaver at last, allowing her husband to help her into her snow-boots. "I suppose the sewing machine's too heavy to bring?" "Yes. It is," said Mr. Beaver. "A great deal too heavy. And you don't think you'll be able to use it while we're on the run, I suppose?" "I can't abide the thought of that Witch fiddling with it," said Mrs. Beaver, "and breaking it or stealing it, as likely as not."

Then there's the gender and characterization issues packed into Mrs. Beaver Against The World. I do not consider it a coincidence that it's the woman of the group that "sensibly" insists on both the bare necessities for travel and the little luxuries in the same breath. And this is the crux: Mrs. Beaver isn't sensible at all. She's emotionally attached to her sewing machine, to the point where she wants to drag it all over the countryside with her rather than let the Witch "fiddle" with it. (This also, of course, illustrates that Mrs. Beaver doesn't know what Jadis is going to do; Jadis will bypass the Beavers' house entirely and head straight to the Stone Tablet -- the sewing machine is safe from witchly fiddling, albeit probably not from wolfy destruction.)

She is so attached to her possessions, that she will actually risk everything -- their lives, the lives of the children, and the future of Narnia -- on her material possessions. She's a silly-sensible woman, a character locked into a very strict pattern of "sensible" behavior, a person who would not be out of place in a satirical etiquette novel a la Jane Austen.

Now maybe this is realistic. There are lots of people in the Real World who allow their love of their possessions to muddle their priorities and put them in prolonged danger. Maybe there's nothing going on here at all except a quick little piece of characterization. Maybe I'm being Too Sensitive to see this as a gendered problem, or this silly-sensible characterization as something that afflicts female characters more often than males.

And yet... why is the sewing machine even here? To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first and last mention of anything so technologically advanced in Narnia. The sewing machine adds nothing whatsoever to the overall plot, does not well-characterize the characters, and creates far more confusion than it alleviates: where is it from, what is it for, how is it maintained and serviced, how can the Beavers afford it, and why will we never see its like again? I truly believe that the only reason the sewing machine exists, the only reason it was allowed to be in the story in spite of all the world-building problems it causes, is as a quick short-hand for Mrs. Beaver's personality.

Mrs. Beaver owns a sewing machine: she is hard-working and industrious. Mrs. Beaver prioritizes her sewing machine over her own safety: she is silly and cannot see the bigger picture. Mrs. Beaver will receive a new sewing machine from Father Christmas: she is a simple woman with simple needs.

And this brings up a point: while I do see Mrs. Beaver's characterization to be a gendered problem, I also fully concede that Mr. Beaver doesn't get much better treatment. He is defined with broad brush-strokes as being a working male proud of his hand-built home, he will receive his home back from Father Christmas as his present, and he too will exhibit a rather silly reluctance to see the bigger picture:

And so at last they all got outside and Mr. Beaver locked the door ("It'll delay her a bit," he said) and they set off, all carrying their loads over their shoulders.

I do think that much of Mr. Beaver's characterization is limited to male stereotypes (he works hard outside the home, he brings home the food, he builds the exterior of the living area) where Mrs. Beaver's characterization is limited to female stereotypes (she works hard inside the home, she cooks the food, she cozifies the interior of the living area). These aren't, perhaps, bad ways to characterize characters, but it's something to think about as we tackle gender assumptions within the series.

"It's an old hiding-place for beavers in bad times," said Mr. Beaver, "and a great secret. It's not much of a place but we must get a few hours' sleep." "If you hadn't all been in such a plaguey fuss when we were starting, I'd have brought some pillows," said Mrs. Beaver. It wasn't nearly such a nice cave as Mr. Tumnus's, Lucy thought -- just a hole in the ground but dry and earthy. It was very small so that when they all lay down they were all a bundle of clothes together, and what with that and being warmed up by their long walk they were really rather snug. If only the floor of the cave had been a little smoother! Then Mrs. Beaver handed round in the dark a little flask out of which everyone drank something -- it made one cough and splutter a little and stung the throat, but it also made you feel deliciously warm after you'd swallowed it -- and everyone went straight to sleep.

It's a shame Mrs. Beaver couldn't bring the pillows, but at least she brought the booze!

It seemed to Lucy only the next minute (though really it was hours and hours later) when she woke up feeling a little cold and dreadfully stiff and thinking how she would like a hot bath. [...] But immediately after that she was very wide awake indeed, and so was everyone else. In fact they were all sitting up with their mouths and eyes wide open listening to a sound which was the very sound they'd all been thinking of (and sometimes imagining they heard) during their walk last night. It was a sound of jingling bells. Mr. Beaver was out of the cave like a flash the moment he heard it. Perhaps you think, as Lucy thought for a moment, that this was a very silly thing to do? But it was really a very sensible one. He knew he could scramble to the top of the bank among bushes and brambles without being seen; and he wanted above all things to see which way the Witch's sledge went. [...] Great was their surprise when a little later, they heard Mr. Beaver's voice calling to them from just outside the cave. "It's all right," he was shouting. "Come out, Mrs. Beaver. Come out, Sons and Daughters of Adam. It's all right! It isn't Her!" This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia -- in our world they usually don't talk at all.

Despite having an English degree, I'm not much for grammar propriety; I tend to think that the only thing that really matters is the effectiveness of communication. So I had to really chew my lip over this one before I conceded that, yes, "It isn't she" probably would have been more correct, but it seems tortured somehow. I would feel a bit sorry for Mr. Beaver being called out publicly by the narrator, but instead I'm distracted by the statement that all beavers use bad grammar when they're excited.

It was a sledge, and it was reindeer with bells on their harness. But they were far bigger than the Witch's reindeer, and they were not white but brown. And on the sledge sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. Everyone knew him because, though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world -- the world on this side of the wardrobe door. But when you really see them in Narnia it is rather different. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn't find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.

And here is the scene we've all been waiting for. After pages and pages of world-building, Jolly Old Saint Nick has been plunked down into our Eternal Winter Fairy Tale and we get to find out that "always winter, but never Christmas" is actually meant to be read literally and not figuratively. Jadis the White Which has been expending huge stores of magical power in order to keep out a Catholic saint that rides a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer and distributes toys down chimneys as a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ who isn't, technically, affiliated with Narnia in any way. At least not under that name.

"I've come at last," said he. "She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch's magic is weakening." And Lucy felt running through her that deep shiver of gladness which you only get if you are being solemn and still.

This is the second time that the narrator has told us about special shivery feelings, and I find it interesting because this one most definitely seems meant to apply to everyone, regardless of their position in or out of Narnia. Instead of a name, the trigger condition here is that of being very solemn and still, and while I have many times in my life been "solemn and still", I can honestly say that a "deep shiver of gladness" has rarely, if ever, accompanied that feeling. Perhaps I'm not doing it right.

I really cannot decide if these Special Feelings are meant to be descriptive of something the author has and does experience or prescriptive as something the child reader should try very hard to experience.

"And now," said Father Christmas, "for your presents. There is a new and better sewing machine for you, Mrs. Beaver. I will drop it in your house as I pass." [...] "And as for you, Mr. Beaver, when you get home you will find your dam finished and mended and all the leaks stopped and a new sluice-gate fitted."

And here are some gendered presents for you along with a big dose of disappointment. Mrs. Beaver, you will have a sewing machine to replace the one that has recently (presumably) been wrecked by the Secret Police; Mr. Beaver, your house is now finished, which is good because the Secret Police probably torched it to ashes a few hours ago. Merry Christmas! Now be off with you, there's a good lad and lass.

Mr. and Mrs. Beaver must surely be hoping at this point that the children will remember who got them on the throne when all this is over, or at least they would if they weren't good, honest, grateful working folks. But me, if I was told that my "present" after 100 years of winter was the replacement of what I'd already lost materially in the last 24 hours, I might feel like Saint Nick was stiffing me a bit, given that I'm still in the process of risking my life to get the kids to the Stone Table and clearly Nicky isn't in the mood to offer us a ride there.

"Peter, Adam's Son," said Father Christmas. [...] "These are your presents," was the answer, "and they are tools not toys. The time to use them is perhaps near at hand. Bear them well." With these words he handed to Peter a shield and a sword. The shield was the color of silver and across it there ramped a red lion, as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it. The hilt of the sword was of gold and it had a sheath and a sword belt and everything it needed, and it was just the right size and weight for Peter to use. Peter was silent and solemn as he received these gifts, for he felt they were a very serious kind of present. "Susan, Eve's Daughter," said Father Christmas. "These are for you," and he handed her a bow and a quiver full of arrows and a little ivory horn. "You must use the bow only in great need," he said, "for I do not mean you to fight in the battle. It does not easily miss. And when you put this horn to your lips and blow it, then, wherever you are, I think help of some kind will come to you."

Here's a couple of fun facts: Peter's sword and shield will have a whole scene in a couple of chapters. Susan's bow will never be mentioned again in this book. The horn will be mentioned -- it will, in fact, be used to summon Peter with his sword and shield in tow so he can be a Big Dang Hero and rescue Susan, but the bow? The bow won't see any action in any of the upcoming fight scenes.

Susan will, actually, learn how to use the bow sometime between the final chapters of this book and the starting chapters of Prince Caspian: she'll use her leet archery skills to Prove Her Worth when the kids are dumped back into Narnia. But never is it implied, to the best of my knowledge, that her skills are anything more than the archery a pampered lady might be inclined to learn: target practice and possibly animal hunts, never war. Susan, it should be remembered, followed the rules given to her. She was told not to fight because she was a girl, and as such she was implicitly told to be feminine.

Let's keep going.

Last of all he said, "Lucy, Eve's Daughter," and Lucy came forward. He gave her a little bottle of what looked like glass (but people said afterward that it was made of diamond) and a small dagger. "In this bottle," he said, "there is a cordial made of the juice of one of the fire-flowers that grow in the mountains of the sun. If you or any of your friends is hurt, a few drops of this will restore them. And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle." "Why, sir?" said Lucy. "I think -- I don't know -- but I think I could be brave enough." "That is not the point," he said. "But battles are ugly when women fight. And now" -- here he suddenly looked less grave -- "here is something for the moment for you all!"

Lucy is the one who rebels. She asks why. She argues politely. She's young enough or plucky enough or perhaps just not beat down enough that she can say This rule? This rule you've just given me? It does not make sense to me. Justify it. Explain it. Prove it.

Why is this scene here, and why are these gifts given? Lucy's dagger won't be used in this book any more than Susan's bow will be -- not even when they have a lion conveniently tied up and needing untying. The girls will pick uselessly at the knots and give up before mice have to come along and do the job for them. Neither of them have a sharp edge on them, it would seem -- apparently they were so afraid of disobeying Saint Nick's injunction that they tossed the sharp Christmas presents (but not the horn or the healing vial, because those are in hand as needed) into a corner of one of the tents and never looked at them again. I think -- I think -- Lucy's dagger will show up briefly in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Maybe.

This scene, this giving of Susan the bow and Lucy the dagger, does nothing to advance the plot. The two items will not be used again in this book, and a good case could be made that their use in later books is as sequel hooks only. Removing the items from the book entirely would have caused no damage whatsoever to the tale; the important items -- the horn that might call help (no guarantees from Santa, I note) and the healing liquid -- would still be dispensed. So why are these items here at all?

It is my theory that these items are here entirely to advance the narrator's belief that "battles are ugly when women fight" and that the girls -- Lucy and Susan -- are not to be involved in the battle. This belief is expressed doubly-forcefully; once with the giving of the bow and once with the giving of the dagger. Two chances to express the same opinion, both taken.

Why is this here? C.S. Lewis, it should be noted, fought in World War I. The Narnia books were written and published after World War II and take their time setting from that period. In both wars, both World War I and World War II, women were taking on very visible roles in the war effort, on the front lines as fighters and medics and on the home front in industrial support roles. The world was clearly no longer a patriarchal fantasy where men do all the manly fighting and women stay home and make sammiches. Lewis, as a former soldier, must have known this -- and he must have known that women in the army didn't make the world wars any uglier or worse than any other war in history that might be fantasized as being a "men only" war. And yet, here we have a scene inserted into the book apparently for the sole purpose of sending a message about womens' place in war. Here are some weapons; don't use them.

Battles may have been "ugly" to the narrator when women fought them, but there's a point here that is almost completely missed: battles are particularly "ugly" when children fight them. Edmund, hero of the war and mortally wounded to boot, is nine years old. Peter, who fights and slays Maugrim alone on Aslan's order because Aslan wants Peter to prove how tough he is, is thirteen years old. There's something "ugly" in this picture, but I'm far from convinced that the problem lies in the genitals of the participants.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is, ultimately, a children's fantasy. It's not a treatise on war, and battles will not be taken seriously in any sense of the word. Peter is a child who is forced to fight alone, with a weapon he's never used before, against an experienced and deadly opponent, and he wins handily because fighting is easy like that. Edmund is a smaller child who is mortally wounded and then when his younger sister begs a moment to be sure he recovers, she is berated for not having a stiff upper lip and tending to the other battle wounded... by herself. Because being an eight-year-old battle medic is a perfectly reasonable, non-scarring situation for a child. And two girl-children will be given weapons and then specifically told not to use them -- not because they're too young, but because they were born the wrong gender.

It's an aspect that didn't need to be in the story. It didn't advance the plot or deepen the characters. It wasn't even in-step with the world that the books were set within, a world where women were fighting and dying that very moment to keep the Pevensie children safe while they explored the inside of a magical wardrobe. Saint Nick -- by saying what he says and doing what he does -- disrespects these women, disrespects these heroes, all so he can deliver his sermon on How The World Ought To Be before chucking some food at the children and driving off. He can't be bothered to help fight the war or give the children a ride to Aslan, after all -- he's got presents to deliver. Priorities, people!

Peter had just drawn his sword out of its sheath and was showing it to Mr. Beaver, when Mrs. Beaver said: "Now then, now then! Don't stand talking there till the tea's got cold. Just like men. Come and help to carry the tray down and we'll have breakfast. What a mercy I thought of bringing the bread-knife."

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comments:

while I have many times in my life been "solemn and still", I can honestly say that a "deep shiver of gladness" has rarely, if ever, accompanied that feeling.

I've had that sometimes: sitting quietly looking at a sunset or a stained-glass window or similar. A feeling that there's something going on here that's good and beautiful but also much bigger than I can quite get my mind around.

Although I don't know if that's what's meant.

Battles may have been "ugly" to the narrator when women fought them, but there's a point here that is almost completely missed: battles are particularly "ugly" when children fight them.

Yeah. And I wouldn't mind this--it's a kids' fantasy, and part of that generally is being able to do what the grown-ups do, like go to war and save the world and so forth--except for the gender stuff. Which...fleh. While I like the Narnia books for the most part, and I don't mind a lot of the details that get brought up in these posts, this bit does bug. Particularly because Lewis does seem to be going out of his way to emphasize gender roles here.

Which makes the whole "lipstick and nylons" thing later seem a bit weird. Okay, so we can't be warriors, but we can't care too much about our looks or society either, so...housewives and nurses or nothing? Is that where we're going?

So I had to really chew my lip over this one before I conceded that, yes, "It isn't she" probably would have been more correct, but it seems tortured somehow.

Sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, I feel that "is" is, or at least can be, a transitive verb. In which case what it is being would not be a complement but an object just as much as what it is hitting is an object. It is being her who is turning him to stone.

I know that this goes against the entire history of thought on the topic of the grammar of verbs of being, but sometimes it really seems like it should be transitive.

We are told that it is:You are impersonating her.You are being she.

I don't buy that. Impersonation is a mere shadow of being yet we're setting it up as more of an action? It's not right.

Also, "She's not herself today," is acceptable grammar where sheself isn't even a word. One might argue that it's saying "her self" (the self belonging to her) except that the genderflopped construction is himself, not hisself.

In the process of writing this pronouns have become strange and unfamiliar to me. I stare at the word and think, "That can't be how you spell her, it doesn't look right, it looks like here with an e missing."

Paraphrasing Santa: "Here is a bow, and some arrows; and for you, here is a vial of healing potion and a dagger. There is a great battle coming, which will decide the fate of this world, and these are powerful weapons which could have a definite effect on the outcome. Do not use them."

Lucy: "...Say what? "

Okay, I think this is meant to imply that women are allowed to defend themselves - which, y'know, good, but also well, duh - but that they should be out fighting battles, because Us Menfolk feel like we're supposed to be protecting them and keeping them safe. But there is an alternate reading...

Santa: "When the battle begins, Peter will keep the Witch's troops distracted. Your job, Daughters of Eve, will be to slip around behind her lines, and assassinate the witch while her attention is elsewhere. That dagger will cut through her defenses, and allow those arrows to end her reign. Be brave, and be careful."

Santa: "Oh, and watch for falling cephalopods - the Witch has many strange beasts in her army, and curious ways of bringing them to the battle!"

Do the Beavers have any names at all? It's a small thing but I just can't get over it - are they the only Beavers left in Narnia? Did both sets of parents decide to call them "Son Beaver" and "Daughter Beaver"? Are they the castorian Adam and Eve? Do working class people not merit proper names, but high-ranking or rich agents of evil like Maugrim and Mr Tumnus do? I could understand it if this were just Early Instalment Weirdness and every animal was named similarly, but it's just the Beavers. What's going on here?

Also, Jadis has reindeer? Kind of detracts from the whole Evil Tyrant of Winter thing. Were there no polar bears on her side?

Because being an eight-year-old battle medic is a perfectly reasonable, non-scarring situation for a child.

And apparently the only combat medic on Aslan's side. Because for all that Narnian centaurs take after Chiron in being wise rather than being drunken rapists, they can't do medicine*? Because Aslan apparently can't do one of the things Jesus spent much of his career doing? (Oh yeah, this is Martial Snarly Clawed Smitey Jesus, isn't it? My mistake.)

*Or did Jadis' forces concentrate on taking out known medics during the fight?

In a story I have yet to write in which time is a spacial dimension allowing those who are freed from the flow of it to walk it as easily as we can walk left, right, forward and back but, human beings being ill adapted to four spacial dimensions, nearly impossible to navigate or understand without the bunches of technology travelers use to make sense of what's before them, the veteran traveler gives his apprentice a weapon he tells him never to use. I think it may have been one of the scenes that I thought out first:

"This is an EMP grenade. Never use it."

"Why give it to me if I'm not supposed to use it?"

"There may come a time when things get so bad that you decide to ignore everything I ever said to you. It is possible that one day things will be so hopeless that you'll be ready to break every rule I ever gave you for even the smallest chance of survival. Hopefully that won't happen, but if that day should come ... well ... don't use it."

This being another case where the movie, with just a couple of tweaks, vastly improved on a scene. Father Christmas (who is technically not St Nicholas) gives Lucy her +1 dagger and her healing potion and "Battles are ugly things fullstop", then gives Susan her horn and bow, to which Susan says "What happened to battles being ugly things?" and FC just gives her this kind of "Yeah, sucks to be old enough, dunnit?" look and moves on.

Peter and Susan are expected to fight (as older siblings), but Lucy wants to fight and Susan does not, which makes both eagerness for battle and expected participation in battle independent of gender. Yay!

To my knowledge Susan only gets to use the bow once, to off Jadis' lackey before he can finish off Edmund or something like that, but it's a minor improvement at least. (I think Lucy indeed uses her dagger to unbind Aslan's body, too.)

Doesn't do anything about Peter's violent initiation or Lucy's Combat Medic Fun Times, of course, but war in Narnia follows basic movie rules in which wounds are very neat and everyone is remarkably clean - no partially detached limbs or people leaking organs.

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I note that when Mr Beaver goes out to find Santa, the narrative pauses to explain that while we probably think this is silly, it is actually very sensible. In case we were worried that he was straying from his assigned role.

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I know that 'it is she' is technically the grammatical phrase, but that is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put. English evolves, as with the current trends in gender-neutral pronouns from singular-they to xie, and I think 'she/him' being analogues is more trouble than it's worth.

someone pops up to helpfully point out that the author can't possibly be at fault because the author was born before [insert current year] and therefore was a product of a sexist society and unable to form alternate opinions. I'm sympathetic to this view, to a point

i'm not. we live in a sexist society now; do we let modern bigots off the hook.

eras are sexist because people listen to the sexists. like lewis. others in his time were less sexist. he was pushing to make things worse.

There's five loads and the smallest for the smallest of us: that's you, my dear," she added, looking at Lucy.

So Talking Beavers are so big Lucy is smaller than them?

OP: "It isn't she" probably would have been more correct, but it seems tortured somehow.

I was quite confused when the narrator complained about grammar. I looked over what Mr. Beaver had just said and found nothing wrong with it. It would never have occurred to me to think “It isn't her” is wrong.Now that you mention it, I vaguely recall something like that in a grammar book I had a few years ago. I don't think I've ever heard it used outside answering the phone (Mom says “This is she”, though in her place I would probably say “That's me”).

Michael Mock: "Never worry, my apprentice. You will never have needed to use this, so don't."

I considered this for a moment, the implications growing more and more apparent. Why had I never realised this before? It seemed obvious now.

“One question, mentor. How many timelines have you destroyed? How many times have you looked my parallel self in the eyes, heard her desperate screams that she deserved existence, and erased her and her whole universe in cold blood? How many?”

Maybe I'm not cut out for this job after all.

(Well, that's what I would think. "You will never have needed this" creeps me out.)

In the back of my mind has long been the idea for a grammar textbook called, "The Time Traveler's Guide to English Grammar," with an adventure story being played out in the example sentences. Is it a textbook or is it an attempt to give heroes their due kleos? Yes.

-

Anyway, the theory of theory of time travel I was talking about in my last post in this thread doesn't allow for that kind of thing. If you leave the present to see what your future was like you'll find out that you disappeared from the timeline the moment you started traveling, and the world went on without you.

Which is how the predecessor culture found itself mostly wiped out. They discovered time travel, went to both ends of the universe, decided heat death sucked, waged a war on the laws of thermodynamics, won, and went to a place where their culture could live forever, that being outside of the normal timeline. They didn't stop to think about who might end up ruling the world they left behind, it turned out that a world without them in it would result in a very strong, very populous, very warlike people becoming the next civilization to learn how to step outside of time.

All of the groundwork already laid (hey, there's air and energy here) they were able to quickly start to do what they did best: wipe out the local population. The predecessors had better technology, but they lacked numbers. The war wiped out most of both sides (and changed the main timeline beyond recognition*), leaving the space ripe for the current breeds of time travelers to settle.

I haven't quite figured out what happens if you insert yourself back into the main timeline so that you can talk to yourself before you left it, which is somewhat problematic because that's where causality can really get confusing. The simplest solution leads to some truly annoying questions.

*The predecessors were from the fourth great Carthaginian empire. Hannibal won in the original timeline.

One thing that bothers me about all of this is my own personal crank about fantasy--the privileging, even in very gender-determinist texts, of the tomboy over the lady.

It was a long time before I really got that this was a thing, and how evilly it was shaped, but once I saw it, I realised that of course sexists would design the system to punish women both for conforming and for failing to conform to their role, because otherwise the whole systemic inequality thing could get undermined. There was some good discussion of this over at Tiger Beatdown when Sady dissected the hideous sexism in Song of Ice and Fire, both on the part of characters and the author. Defenders said that the author obviously had feminist leanings because the tomboy daughter got to have awesome adventures while the daughter who was trying to be a 'proper lady' was made to endure endless psychological tortures, sometimes physical abuse, and see everything she loved destroyed. Right. As long as it's clear that there's some kind of woman we're supposed to hate.

Recalling past discussions about the Penny Arcade duo's total abject failures to understand rape culture or act like decent people, I did like Jerry/Tycho's thoughts on a similar matter. (Context: for the art of the third Mass Effect game, in which you can choose your character's gender/etc, they decided to feature a female version of the hero rather than a male, and had a vote on which of several options would be the official one. The one who was most popular at first had long blonde hair, and was attacked by a number of people for being a 'ditzy airhead'.) As he said on the matter:

"She also has a symmetrical body and blond hair, which is unfortunate - she might otherwise have been valid, interesting, or powerful. [...] I always forget which people we may stereotype safely; it’s entirely possible I missed the latest communique."

I think the logic behind "battles are ugly when women fight" goes like this: women don't ordinarily fight. They only pick up weapons when things have gone horribly wrong, when the enemy has broken through the defenses and the only thing standing between them and the children they're about to murder is a woman and the steak knife/broom/rock she's just picked up. Last-ditch efforts are uglier than organized warfare, because desperation takes over and people will ignore every rule of civilized behavior in order to survive.

The involvement of women in WWI and WWII, therefore, is a sign of how much more awful those wars were than the ones that came before: they were so all-consuming that they dragged the entire society into their bloody vortex. Nobody escaped the horrors of those wars; they just suffered to a greater or lesser degree.

That might be me looking for an interpretation I can understand, though, if not agree with. It's quite possible that what Lewis really meant was that it was a greater tragedy for a woman to be injured or die than for the same thing to happen to a man -- which is a philosophy I really can't grok, outside of scenarios where the survival of your people really does depend on women popping out as many babies as they can.

About the names: I like to think of "Beaver" as a surname (since in Victorian society it was quite normal for women to call their own husbands "Mr. Lewis" or whatever). They could have first names, that we never learn. Sure, Mr. Tumnus isn't called Mr. Faun, but maybe the species name is the equivalent of "Smith;" it's just really common, and there are other beavers with different surnames.

It's funny...as a child, I attributed the "bad grammar" comment to the phrase "sons and daughters of Adam" bit. Which I now realize is not a grammar mistake at all, but rather a continuity blip: it's the only place where boys and girls are lumped together with just Adam. That's what my mind registered as the "mistake". The "it isn't her" thing blew right over my head. Still does most of the time, and I'm a writer :P

On the Beavers not having actual names...I think this makes a kind of sense if you look at it from a child's perspective. The Beavers are portrayed as just the sort of kindly adults that a child would only know as Mr. Last Name and Mrs. Last Name. Growing up, there were many adults in my life that didn't have first names to me, and even if I knew the adult's first name, politeness demanded that I never call them that anyway. The fact that the last name happens to be Beaver keeps in tradition with a lot of childhood stories, where any central animal and "other" creatures' last names, if they had them, were generally what the creature was (I'm thinking of the Berenstein Bears, specifically).

On Lucy's dagger- Yeah, I honestly cannot remember a single instance where Lucy ever used it. (Never thought about the scene with Aslan on the Stone Table before, although *maybe* you could make the argument that she was so distraught that she simply forgot she had the darn thing.) I think maybe it got a passing mention in Prince Caspian as something found in the treasure room. At least she gets to brandish it at the entire Telmarine army in the movie version (that's one of my favorite scenes, actually). But even there she never uses it on anyone, I don't think.

One overarching thing that always bothered me about Narnia was how authority figures never did really try to explain things to the kids, and that kind of includes gender roles. The kids were told How Things Are and what rules they needed to follow, and if the unfairness or strangeness of the rules was ever pointed out, the authority figure would always take the "you don't need to understand, just trust me, it's better this way" cop-out. Aslan in particular is BAD about that...it was the one thing I never liked about him. Unfairness in How Things Are was only rarely pointed out and always dismissed without being resolved. Susan "got what she deserved" at the end for choosing for forget, and nobody ever seems particularly upset about this. Jill is expected follow Aslan's riddles in the Silver Chair without being told what they are for or why, both children are subsequently blamed for messing up the first one despite being thrust into a strange place where they don't know who anyone is or what's going on. Lucy doesn't get to know what might have happened if she hadn't eavesdropped on her friend using the magician's book in the Dawn Treader because it's "none of her business" (with the implication being that she should have remained in ignorance).

And women don't fight in battles because That's How Things Are (although, interestingly, Lucy does go to battle in The Horse and His Boy, but the other characters treat it as kind of a charming quirk of hers, and she only gets to do it because she's a Queen and nobody is going to tell her no).

I think that Lewis has been reading too many sagas. In those, boys would be separated from their mothers and sisters at seven and sent off to the all-male world of the Boys' House or the lord's hall, and at fourteen would be presented with their own arms and armor and admitted to the company of warriors. In that context, a boy of thirteen is practically a man, and certainly would be expected to want to take part in any available battles. Consider Prince Corin in THAHB, who is told he's too young to fight but sneaks off to the army anyway; his father is officially angry but actually delighted, and everyone knows it.

And in that world, give or take the occasional spearwife or shieldmaiden or Warrior Queen, women are noncombatants. Although they'd often end up as booty if their side lost, and I don't see why that's any prettier.

Which, speaking of Ice&Fire...not to go off on too much of a tangent, Martin certainly creates a brutally misogynistic society, but I don't think you can extrapolate too much about the author from that-- except that his world is based on fourteenth-century Europe and a high degree of misogyny is to be expected. At least Martin has women in his stories, which is more than you can say for some, and at least they're women with lives and souls and plans of their own.

Defenders said that the author obviously had feminist leanings because the tomboy daughter got to have awesome adventures while the daughter who was trying to be a 'proper lady' was made to endure endless psychological tortures, sometimes physical abuse, and see everything she loved destroyed. Right. As long as it's clear that there's some kind of woman we're supposed to hate. I haven't read the original discussion to which you refer, but I'd say that's a drastic oversimplification of both Arya's and Sansa's stories. I never got the feeling that I was supposed to hate Sansa, or that what happened to her was her own fault. I thought I was supposed to feel sorry for her, for being trapped by what her society led her to believe about good girls and fairy-tale endings. I also thought I was supposed to feel sorry for Arya, whose "awesome adventures" were not particularly awesome from her point of view. She lost her family and her home and everything she loves, just as much as Sansa has. She too has been physically and psychologically abused. She too is trying to survive in a world which has no concern at all for her well-being. Both of them are having to learn to tell truth from lies and reality from appearances. Whether tomboy or lady, although their battlegrounds are different, both of them need to learn how to strike back against those who are bigger or stronger or more powerful.

And I think you could make a good case that Daenerys is the most morally appealing of those who are playing the game of thrones, or that Brienne of Tarth, the butt of everyone's jokes, is actually the most honorable knight in Westeros...er, I did say I wasn't going to go off on a tangent?

But I just finished A Dance With Dragons, so it's still on my mind. Excuse it, please, and let's get back to Narnia.

Someone at either Slacktiverse or old Slacktivist (that is, the place that is now Slacktiverse but at a time before the Slacktivist-Slacktiverse split) commented that it was frequently the case that writers would use common spoken language and then feel the need to disclaim that it was improper grammar. You'd almost never see it spoken properly*, instead you'd have something like:

"It's him," Johnny said ungrammatically.

(Example completely fabricated.)

So, assuming I'm remembering correctly and assuming that the person who said it originally was correct, it's not just Lewis but instead part of a fairly widespread convention.

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*For a given value of "properly". I've made my argument that the thing we are shifting towards is better than that we are turning from. Then again, I end sentences with prepositions, and I thought the dangling participle from King's Quest VI was adorable.

Fun fact: Lucy never ever uses her dagger ever. Even in PC, when they're trying to untie Trumkpin with Peter's sword, and it's very awkward going because swords aren't very good for untying ropes--you can't grip below the hilt, Lewis explains--no one ever seems to remember that OH RIGHT, there is a useful cutting implement RIGHT THERE.

Also, interestingly, Lucy goes to war in HHB and fights (or at least is prepared to fight? I don't remember if it gets to a battle) in VDT, and Jill Pole fights for her life in TLB. But they both use bows, which I guess are...more...feminine?

I suspect also that there's that awful double standard at play, where women can't do men's work because that's not feminine, but women can't do women's work either because it's useless, so all the women in Narnia are prettily dead (Ramandu's daughter), useless (Susan, Lasaraleen), or young enough to want to Be One of the Boys, in which case they get rewarded for their tomboyishness but ultimately can only ever be as good as a boy. Which...is I guess better than dead/damned? [I suspect that also, Jill and Lucy can only get away with this because they are so young. Twelve and a tomboy is charming; past puberty, I suspect it gets into Not Being A Lady territory.]

By the way, the deep shiver you get when solemn and still. The only shiver I get when I'm still (assuming I'm not cold) is the, "This is your body talking and oh my fracking god I have to move. Can I please move? No. Seriously, just a little. Still no? Fine, I'm doing it anyway in three .. two ... one," shiver. I don't know if other people get that, but I certainly do.

Somehow I don't think it was what Lewis was talking about. (Amoung other things, I wouldn't describe it as a shiver of gladness.)

I've had involuntary deep shivers when I was solemn and still: for awhile, I would just go sit in my vegetable patch and rest, soaking up the world.Unfortunately, that was the summer where a large number of ants moved in, and I always found myself sitting in their nest. (Nature had a way of making any grandiose symbolism more down-to-earth. I guess I'm lucky it wasn't centipedes.)I'm pretty sure that's not what Lewis has in mind either, though it might have been my reaction if Santa appeared and told me that a talking lion was on his way and would soon be attacking the woman that my brother had just gone to be with.

Amaranth: The Beavers are portrayed as just the sort of kindly adults that a child would only know as Mr. Last Name and Mrs. Last Name. Growing up, there were many adults in my life that didn't have first names to me, and even if I knew the adult's first name, politeness demanded that I never call them that anyway.

I've heard there's a stage of childhood in which unrelated adults are referred to like that, but I don't think I ever experienced it myself. As I recall, parents of other kids jumped straight from “[Child]'s mom/dad” to “[First name]”, dependent partly on my age but mostly on whether the primary relationship was with the parent or the child. (But I also tended to know the parents more and the kids less as I got older, so it's hard to determine relative influence.) Non-parent adults were always first name.

I have always expected that Lasaraleen is not half as silly as she would like everyone, her husband especially included, to think. I expect she lived to be a very imperious elderly lady who everyone was afraid of, because she knew every damn thing that had happened in Calormen for ninety years, and exactly whose father had been responsible.

I have always expected that Lasaraleen is not half as silly as she would like everyone, her husband especially included, to think.

Someday we may get around to H&HB, and I'll expand thereupon, but I have a ton of theories about Lasaraleen.

Among them is that she is intended to parallel Corin, as a person who refuses to accept the responsibilities of full maturity (a "Queen" or "King") by embracing an exaggerated gender stereotype of what it means to be a "grown up Princess / Prince."

(Or, in other words, spend their entire youths trying to reach "the silliest portion of their lives" and then spend the rest of their lives "trying to stay there." Yes, I think that there's parables with the so-called "problem of Susan", although I've never been clear what this "problem" was supposed to be.)

Which is why I've always been puzzled by people taking Corin's misogynistic opinions as Lewis's; personally, I thought we were supposed to give them as much credit as Lasaraleen's praise of the Tisroc.

Despite this being a failing, it is clearly not a damning one; Lasaraleen is portrayed with considerable affection, earning Aravis's approbation as "having a lovely life, but not for me"; and Corin is namechecked in Aslan's Country (I thought that Lasaraleen was too; in fact I was so convinced of it that I was astonished that apparently Aravis and Helen are the only females named, boo hiss Lewis.)

I absolutely believe Lasaraleen grew to be a terrifying Calormene matron. :) :) Even in HHB while she's being "silly" she sneaks a girl out of the country (and she knows that Aravis knows about the Calormene plot to invade the north as she does it), and she is obviously aware of the risks if they're caught. I wouldn't want to cross this girl when she was being serious, tbh.

Hapax, that's really interesting! I hadn't thought of Corin in that light before but I like it. And it certainly works with his characterization--I always thought that part of the reason everyone was so willing to accept Cor as the long-lost heir was that, well, at least they weren't going to get King Corin.

So Father Christmas gives all the women something they can't use (a sewing machine, a bow, and a knife) but might want in addition to what they will need (the horn and the elixir), and the boys all get something that they both want and need (a finished house, and a freakin sword and shield). So Father Christmas really does like the boys more than the girls, apparently. And apparently it's Peter's job to be the military one all by himself, since neither Lucy or Susan are supposed to use their weapons. In what world where we have already established the presence of evil that doesn't hesitate to kill does this make any sort of sense? Is Father Christmas hinting that one of the rules of the game is that you never hurt the women? If that's the case, then how does one resolve Jadis being the antagonist? Unless, as previously mentioned in the narrative, her lack of being a Daughter of Eve means she doesn't count as a woman and is thus exempted from the rules regarding hurting women...

Yeah, this whole thing felt weird to me even at 7. I agree with Will Wildman that the movie version of the Father Christmas scene vastly improved upon the book: not only made the scene less sexist, but made it make much more sense.

It's interesting, though, that Lewis doesn't seem to mind letting girl protagonists fight in the later stories. Lucy does take part in the fight in THAHB, Corin's backhanded compliment aside (and then again, prince Corin really is a dick). And more to the point, Jill in TLB. Though I suppose Lewis would definitely call the battle she fights in an 'ugly' one. That whole story is ugly, really - which I guess was sort of the point.

Okay. disclaimer: Yes, I am male, and I am aware that I may have some cultural baggage on gender roles myself. Please do not take the following as an entitled angry complaint, but as a genuine request for information.

I completely agree that the gender seperation in this sequence is just depressing. I'd have accepted the reprimand towards Lucy, as she seems by far the least emotinally mature, but on Susan it sounds just weird. "Peter, here's a sword. Go fuck some shit up. Susan here's a bow. Don't use it, and when there's trouble, call for your brother with his sword." It's just stupid. And really bothering that the weapons don't actually get used, so the only point of this exchange was that Lewis wanted to cram in some dialogue on gender roles. If he'd only handed them the horn and vial, we'd have something to say about the fact that he's letting 2/3rds of the resistance force go unarmed (or rather, 4/5ths cause I think if it hasn't been Christmass for years the Beavers are entitled to a few more presents.) but the sexism would've been less blatant than it is now.

But reading the comments on other stories with problematic gender roles kinda makes me wonder what the right way is. I see that there are readers taking issue with the tomboy-heroine because (correct me if I misunderstand the point you made) it's a case of making the good girl be someone who tries to be just like a boy. I can see why that too has some unfortunate implications, namely that 'male' is the ideal and the worth of any female character is how well she can emulate it.

But if there are problems with a female character in a female role, and with a female character in a male role, then how would one write a good female character? If we have a story where conflict is inevitable, what is a good way to write women. I may one day get off my lazy ass and try to write some of the stories I have in my head, and I would like to know how to maneuver between the minefields on both sides of the right path. I mean, you could have a woman who gets things done by manipulating events, a-la Vetinari from the Discworld novels (I love that guy), but you'd risk writing a femme-fatale stereotype who seems to just seduce and manipulate the real men into doing all the work.

What, for instance, makes Clair from Claymore a good female character and makes Arya a poorer example (I didn't read Song of ice and fire, so I'm just going by the descriptions people made here)? Does it 'help' that Claymore doesn't actually have any real ass-kicking males, since all the superpowered soldier are female? (Not counting all the ones they tried first and were all strong but turned evil. I commented on why that bit bothered me in the comments for the episode) Or because there isn't a femine girl who suffers a lot? That one doesn't sound like it applies, since in the flashback Claire was a regular feminine girl and got hit with a series of horrible events untill she asked the Organization to turn her into a super-powered warrior so she could get revenge, which sounds like a pretty 'male' stereotype too.

Again, don't take this as a "you women are never happy"-douchebaggy demand. I'm aware that, not being a woman, I can have blinds spots on how to write a female character that doesn't grate readers that happen to be women in some way, so I'm just curious how to avoid such problems.

1) Write individuals, not "member of X group." The moment one goes, "X must be like this, because zie is part of Y group," then some rethinking is probably required. Despite what Sherlock Holmes would have you believe, not all doctors or sailors or women or executive transvestites act the same, and handling them as if they were is bad writing. Yes, members of a certain group may have a number of shared experiences--for example most QUILTBAG people would have encountered some sort of QUILTBAGphobia in their lives--but they do not perceive or react to it as a monolith.

2) Don't punish characters for deciding to do what they want. There is nothing inherently wrong about choosing to be a tomboy who likes trucks and swords and trucks that turn into swords, just as there is nothing inherently wrong about choosing traditionally feminine pursuits like being a stay at home parent (or, when it comes to it, being a stay-at-home mother who likes trucks and swords), so why have the story point out that either is "wrong"?

Here's an out-there theory that I just made up about Susan not being allowed to use her bow in battle.

Father Christmas specifically says the bow should be used only as a last ditch defense and that it "does not easily miss". That means her bow has what amounts to an accuracy spell placed on it (which is never mentioned again. Why, I don't know. It makes that little competition she had with Trumpkin massively unfair...who competes in an archery contest with an accuracy-spelled bow and doesn't tell the other person? And then chalks the win up to mere superior skill? Susan's accuracy with the bow is always attibuted to her skill).

Clearly FC was afraid if Susan fought in the battle she would essentially render Peter superfluous, taking out every enemy before it could even get in range of Peter's sword. And we can't have that, because that wouldn't be...fair? Why not give the SWORD the accuracy spell, if you're trying to win a war? (For that matter, why are only the girls given the magic items while Peter gets the plain tools? Is it that men can take care of themselves and everyone else using their own superior strength?, while girls need the help of the supernatural to protect themselves? Gah, I hope that's not it.)

Thanks for the responses. Though I framed the question in "How should I write", it isn't likely to happen in the short term, and I was also curious about it in a general sense of other works. Like I said, I didn't read Song of Ice and Fire, so I was only going by what the commenters said about it. And when I could see the problem commenters had with a girl-in-a-girly-role character in this book (oh, I could see it so very well) but could also understand the problem with a girl-in-a-boyish-role, I was wondering what the right way to go about it is. If the Ice and Fire story indeed makes a point of promoting one single behavior for all its female characters to uphold, then I can see the problem.

But as far as the 'write as people' idea goes, I agree with the sentiment but it sounds hard in practice. Because what do you choose as the neutral baseline, as the genderless default role that your characters are around? As an example, in one of those uber-macho shooter games from the Gears of war-mold, the "neutral" behavior is that of an testostrone factory. Which means many female characters in such story end up... badly. Basically, you end up with a character that serves as eyecandy and storywise just tries to out-macho the meatslabs around her. Of course, most works of fiction have better stories than such games, but it does illustrate the problem of defining the baseline 'person' when you try to write someone as just a person.

You can use your own experience to define the 'normal', but that does mean any cultural stereotypes or prejudices you have get out onto the paper with them. I like to think that I am open minded and fair in my ideas, but that's my view. And I think you can't get a worse judge of your own cultural blindspots or preconceptions than yourself. If you could see them, you wouldn't be having them.

As far as not punishing for choices, the story that I had in mind was actually pretty big on the consequences of choices, but (as far as I'm able to judge anyway) none of the choices were gender role related. They were more about moral choices and (mis)trust. Oh, and the epilogue that takes place about a dozen years after the story, you'd see one of the two main female characters is now a mother and doctor, while the other is a general. And they both get along and respect the others choice. I hadn't really thought about that scene in terms of gender roles before, it felt more like a logical extension of their actions up to that point. But I think it does pass Mime's second test. :)

I vaguely assume that all their gear is enchanted - the potion heals to perfect health with a single drop, the bow is super-accurate, the horn has +4 Luck, and the sword and shield are enchanted to not weigh seven thousand pounds the way they would presumably feel in the arms of an untrained teenager. Given the raw level of magic in Narnia, it's entirely possible that most every weapon is enchanted in some way, but FC makes the point here to Susan both because they're still catching up on the rules and to boost her confidence if she does have to use it.

(In reality, of course, a sword of that size would probably weigh 2-3 pounds, because swords are finesse weapons, not blunt instruments. But anyone who has ever tried being a conductor can tell you that even waving around a baton weighing about negative-three grams gets exhausting after a surprisingly short period of time. Swordplay is all sorts of tricky.)

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Kit put the best answer most succinctly, but to expand:

But if there are problems with a female character in a female role, and with a female character in a male role, then how would one write a good female character?

The problem that some people have with Arya and Sansa is that it's merely the photonegative of the ordinary oppression. Hypothetically, if Sansa likes the things that are female-cultured in her world and Arya rejects them, then Sansa should be praised by her society and Arya will be pushed towards the frilly dresses and needlepoint. The proto-feminist-ish thing that some writers will do is to instead reward Arya for rejecting all that dumb girl stuff and harangue Sansa for cleaving to it. In the first case, women were being punished for not fitting in their assigned role; in the second case, they're being punished for not rejecting it.

In both cases, there is a Single Right Way for women to be, and that means that there is always some type of woman who is being punished for not following that path, and always some way in which women in general garner hatred - for liking stuff that isn't 'male', or for trying to be 'male' when they're not.

If a character's decision is (out-of-universe) judged based on their gender, the story has gone wrong somewhere.

I wonder if it's to balance out the apparent paucity of the gifts. (Although I assumed the sword and shield were magic, too.)

"Here's a sword emblazoned with your kingly symbol, and a shield to match, the better for you to distinguish yourself in battle! Here's a dagger, but don't use it. Uh, it's a *magic* dagger."

Magic things are often double-edged swords - I wonder if the warning on the bow is that it always hits *something*, but not always what you intend. For example, it might hit your foot, or an ally, or your favorite vase, unless it was sufficiently motivated by self-preservation to kill the enemy. In which case, Santa would be giving a curse, but I basically think arming an untrained 13-year-old and send him into battle is the same deal, so . . . yeah.

I was thinking about the same thing - specifically I had Ellen Ripley in mind, as there's (unconfirmed but persistent?) rumour that she was originally written as a male character, and thus when played by a woman, had the freedom of being in a role that was written for a person rather than a collection of stereotypes. (I saw Alien and Aliens for the first time back-to-back a couple of weeks ago. All chitinous thumbs up.)

I've seen some backlash lately because people are, quite rightly, saying "Why is Ripley still our go-to female action hero; those movies are decades old now", but - well, that's not Ripley's fault. I hypothesise that it's part of the whole 'feminism is over' concept - we have Ripley, so now we don't need to write any more strong female characters and can go back to writing men. (See also: 'black president = racism is over'.)

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Clearly FC was afraid if Susan fought in the battle she would essentially render Peter superfluous, taking out every enemy before it could even get in range of Peter's sword.

In the oft-maligned Drizzt books, there's Drizzt himself, the greatest fencer in the world, and there's the female lead Catti-brie, who picks up a bow that has an inexhaustible quiver, fires in straight lines (no gravity), and pierces just about anything. When being fired into a horde of monsters, it is noted for taking out several foes at a time. I was never clear on why their battle plans took any form other than 'protect Catti-brie while she mows down everyone not surrendering'.

For some reason bows are the feminine 'support' weapon, even when they should rightly be vastly more powerful and tactically important.

Indeed, ideally, write more than one character of Group X, for much narrower definitions of "Group X" than "women", particularly if you're creating characters with negative repercussions: if your villain is a "masculine"/"feminine"/seductive/independent woman, for the love of God have a positive example of same somewhere in the story, even if she's not as prominent. It goes a long way.

As an example, in one of those uber-macho shooter games from the Gears of war-mold, the "neutral" behavior is that of an testostrone factory. Which means many female characters in such story end up... badly.

Well, define "badly"? I mean, a woman in such a situation probably *would* be as shooty and macho as the men around her, because...why not? If uber-macho shooter behavior is bad for female characters, surely it's also bad for male ones--but if you're playing Gears of War, that's probably what you're looking for, so I'm not seeing the problem.

I may be reading this badly due to morning and so forth, and my apologies if I am, but this sounds pretty close to suggesting that women can't or shouldn't be macho gun-loving types, or that having internal plumbing necessarily creates differences in outlook and behavior. Which is going to annoy me, I'll warn you right off.

Now, in fairness, I remember hating Sansa when I read Game of Thrones. Not because she liked female stuff, but because I recall her as being both priggish/preachy about it and also because...oh my God, the naivete/sappy romanticism got on my last nerve.

These days, I don't like those qualities any better, but I'm like "...well, she's twelve. You grow out of that shit." Whereas I read Game when I was in high school, and had a lot less sympathy for characters based on age: you're only a few years younger than me, girl! Get it together! Oh my God!

In the Iliad Paris' weapon was a bow. He was looked down on for it. Of all the reasons to look down on Paris (and there were many) that one never made sense. A bow is a pretty damned important weapon. It's not something to laugh at.

And, obviously, the Amazons were famous for fighting using their bows so we've got an association with bows and women at least that far back.

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Well, define "badly"? I mean, a woman in such a situation probably *would* be as shooty and macho as the men around her, because...why not? If uber-macho shooter behavior is bad for female characters, surely it's also bad for male ones--but if you're playing Gears of War, that's probably what you're looking for, so I'm not seeing the problem.

I haven't played the game so I can't speak to what's actually in it. I read "badly" completely differently than you did. I figured it meant "dead." Mind you after that my reaction was much the same, presumably a lot of the male characters end up the same way, I'm guessing that's sort of what happens if you're playing Gears of War.

Or, in other words, spend their entire youths trying to reach "the silliest portion of their lives" and then spend the rest of their lives "trying to stay there." Yes, I think that there's parables with the so-called "problem of Susan", although I've never been clear what this "problem" was supposed to be.

Well, at the risk of TMI-ing: that particular sentence in the book makes me prickle more than most, and has for years. (See also the "selfish pleasure-seeker" thing in Wind in the Door.)

See, I *like* flirting, and sleeping with guys, and putting effort into being attractive. More to the point, perhaps, I don't want to settle down, stop doing the above and running off on adventures. I have no desire to have kids, start caring about refrigerator-shopping or linoleum or whatever, or...any of the stuff that commonly gets lumped under "being a grown-up".

And it's hard not to interpret the whole "silliest portion of their lives" thing as a condemnation of what I do want, which pisses me off.

If there's another way to read it, that would be awesome. If I'm just projecting, that's fine--it's quite possible. But as I read that particular passage, the All Sensible People Settle Down thing offends me as much as the sexism.

Personally, I don't like those male characters either. And I don't play Gears of war myself, I don't own the console. I named it because it is a widely known example and a bit notorious for a lot of other modern shooter games rather blatantly following its lead in terms of visuals and gameplay.

The reason I brought it up was because it made a good example for my question as to how you define a "normal person" in your story. I also hadn't quite realized that the main problem some commenters had with the Ice and Fire example is how it seemed to create a different but just as restrictive gender role for the women. I understand that now, so the example isn't really relevant.

"I've seen some backlash lately because people are, quite rightly, saying "Why is Ripley still our go-to female action hero; those movies are decades old now", but - well, that's not Ripley's fault."

Yep, and about that: if there were a huge selection of female action heroes of all varieties, everybody could pick whichever they liked best. And by female action hero, I do not necessarily mean someone who glams around in skin-tight black leather 'ninjing' all over the place. I really wish there were a range of women who were (a) not scantily-clad, (b) not characterized by their area of expertise, and (c) not the only woman to appear in the whole damn movie!

Admittedly, I don't watch much in the way of action films, mainly because the trailers never do anything to say "hey, this is something you'll want to see." The bits I do see usually seem to imply explosion-porno. And also admittedly, I've become so frustrated as to pretty much give up on watching any new movie, so if anything significant has changed recently in this respect I wouldn't know about it..... :-/

Yep. Which...I do know girls like that RL, and they do bug me, and I can't say I'm entirely above writing them into stories as villains/obstacles/pains in the ass. I haven't done it yet, for the most part--though there's a very minor character in NPL who bears some influence--but I have mocked the twee, and I would again. The problem I have is the conflation of "twee" with "traditionally 'feminine' skills"*, and also...

...I can't think of any prominent "girly" fantasy writers who Sansa would really represent. Lackey has her drippy moments, particularly in the earlier novels--"lifebonding," ugh--but she's not all "everything will work out in the end if you just look good up in this tower, handsome princes are awesome, la la". Like, if Martin's trying to show his rebellion against traditional good-and-evil, pretty-people-are-great fantasy, the most iconic example of that is...Tolkien. Who was male.

So...I'm not sure what he was thinking there, but fleh. I'm not a giant fan anyhow--I can see why other people like the books, the worldbuilding is great, but the "I'm going to kill off a bunch of characters and make everything squalid because I can" thing is not my cup of tea, thanks.

*For an author who avoids the hell out of that: Robin McKinley, particularly her later stuff.

One thing I've read about writing (and I think this came from Stephen King) was that characters DO things even when the narrative isn't looking. They have goals and fears and dreams and hobbies, and remembering that helps a long way towards avoiding stereotype-ville.

Then, too, I feel that people are complicated. (Note: Haven't read the books, probably never will, LOVED the link above) Ayra could hate embroidery but love something else that is girly (see Cimorene who loves fencing and cooking). Sansa could like dancing best for a reason - she loves the exertion and energy out something. Or embroidery is how she expresses her artistic side. Instead of just XYZ likes girly things because; ABC dislikes girly things because.

Then there's the gender swap which Kit already recommended. How does the story change if the characters genders all swap? Does that TOTALLY REASONABLY WRITTEN Protective Mother character suddenly become a stupid, ineffectual, bumbling father? Maybe Mother needs some rewrites then.

One thing you can do is put yourself in the character. I'm Sansa. What do I want out of life? What are my fears? What's the one thing I want that I know I can't have? Etc. I think spending an afternoon in a character's head can make all the difference in the world.

I feel like Lackey's one of those authors who has by and large gotten better with time. Not entirely so (there was a passage in the Godmother book about sex and love that had me gagging a little) but she definitely seems to have rethought some of her earlier tropes.

One thing you can do is put yourself in the character. I'm Sansa. What do I want out of life? What are my fears? What's the one thing I want that I know I can't have? Etc. I think spending an afternoon in a character's head can make all the difference in the world.

also remember that people are affected by experiences. iirc, sansa never learns a thing despite rude awakening after r a and stays naive long after she couldn't possibly be that inexperienced, which could make her an annoying character but is actually annoying plotting, cos ppl aren't like that, even girly girls. people learn an change.

It's interesting, though, that Lewis doesn't seem to mind letting girl protagonists fight in the later stories. Lucy does take part in the fight in THAHB, Corin's backhanded compliment aside (and then again, prince Corin really is a dick). And more to the point, Jill in TLB.

It is my *personal* opinion that Lewis was very uncomfortable as a writer with feminine women. Tomboys are okay (almost as good as men!) and Mothers are okay (they take care of the men!) but attractive, feminine, sexual women, no. An attractive, feminine, sexual woman going into battle and being "as good as a man" without trying to hew to male stereotypes? DO NOT WANT. At least, that is my opinion.

Tomboys and Mothers (in literature, not real life) accept male superiority. The Tomboy accepts it by trying to emulate it; the Mother accepts it by nurturing and submitting to it. The sexual woman does not: she can desire a man, but does not necessarily acknowlege the superiority of the man. And if she can control her relationship status (not-daughter, not-wife, not-mother) then she is a completely uncontrollable character, which I think can be uncomfortable to someone who likes everyone to be in their place and never move from it.

Tying back into the Many Waters discussion from last time, I think an insecurity with sexual women is present in a lot of Christian literature. Sexual women, after all, "cause" erections and impure thoughts, which is very pesky for the pur Christian boy trying to be pure, dammit. Tomboys do not, or at least they're not trying to, because in One-Dimensional Character town, if a girl wants to BE a man, she doesn't simultaneously want to be WITH him, if you catch my drift.

My personal opinion is that Susan -- who starts the series about to bud into her sexuality, is given less words-per-book than the vilain child who *doesn't have a speaking part after Chapter 11*, and who will later be labelled Not A Friend Of Narnia -- always made the author profoundly uncomfortable. Lucy fighting is something that he came to terms with; she's a warrior queen, albeit one that isn't Strong And Powerful, but rather one that is Sweet And Bubbly yet almost (not quite!) as good as a man. But Susan fighting? Sexual Susan, who has dozens of "lovers" and embraces her sexual beauty? That would have been terribly subversive indeed, I think.

I, rather cynically, would say *that* depends on the people. (Though the "Jesus, you never goddamn learn" thing certainly isn't inextricably linked to femininity.)

However, fictional characters, particularly prominent/POV ones, should change and grow. Otherwise, it's really unsatisfying for the reader to spend any time with them.* It's sort of like how you can have far more and weirder coincidences in RL than you do in fiction--or, to get political, how I couldn't write the GOP leadership into a book or game, because...come on, nobody's *that* horrible.

*One of my common critiques of characters I don't like: "Yeah, there are people like that. But I don't want to spend five minutes talking to them over drinks, let alone sympathize with them for a book/show/whatever."

Hmm, Kit's gender swap does give me something to think about. Because in the story I have in my head, there is actually an event that matches her example a bit too well for comfort, and it does happen to a girl, the would-be general in fact. While it doesn't include any sexual violence, it is certainly a traumatising event for her, and it does change her from seeing the events around her like an exciting adventure (much like the Narnia-kids sans Edmund) to a more grim personality. This all happens before the story proper starts, and is later revealed. I made her to contrast the attitude of the other characters who are more optimistic and eager about it (for the most part anyway).

So yes, it is a case of a terrible tragedy befalling a character to 'teach them a lesson'. On the other hand, I would not find it unfitting to have the same thing happen to a male character so for me personally the 'gender swap' test gets passed. And like I said, it happens before the story starts. And after it's all found out and it becomes clear that just because she isn't being a "Power of friendship" believer doesn't mean she isn't very dangerous enemy to the big bad, her major character arc is realizing (but not liking to admit) that she went too far the other way and is lashing out at other people who could be at her allies. Kind of the mirror of the other protagonists (male and female) who, to greater or lesser extent, realize they've been treating the dangers too lightly and been too dismissive of the former character. So it isn't it's being done to teach the character an unambigious lesson on how to properly behave, much less a lesson on how to behave as a girl. So personally, I can give this idea a pass on the gender test (though you could argue that a horrible-tragedy-backstory is poor writing regardless of gender). But whether I personally don't intend this as a gender-role issue, it doesn't mean it might not look this way (or more disturbing, it might actually be one and I don't realize it myself.)

So, I'm not sure if I'm bringing privilege blinders to this or not, and I'm sure this is something lots of people have said before, but...I really think that that dissection of ASOIAF *completely* missed the point of the books. There are criticisms of ASOIAF that I really agree with -- for example, there are really not enough competent female rulers, although to be fair there aren't many competent *male* rulers either -- but...I mean, the whole point of the series is to deconstruct the stereotypical medieval world that's so endemic to fantasy books. The vast majority of the stuff that Sady says is hideously sexist is intentional, because GRRM is trying to show how hideously sexist the stereotypical medieval fantasy world is. He's not saying that rape is a good thing, he's saying that it's something that happened a lot in medieval-type societies, and stereotypical fantasy is *bad* for glossing over it so much. And honestly, I think Arya (the tomboy) is punished just as much as Sansa (her more feminine sister) is. I mean, she ends up on the run, all her friends are killed (including the new ones she makes), she's subjected to a ton of physical and psychological abuse...by itself, this storyline would be one that a (very cruel) sexist would point to as a reason to be a good little girl who listens to her parents. Nor is Sansa depicted as someone to hate -- rather, she's depicted as a pretty decent person who tried to play by the rules as she was told them, and was very rudely awakened to the fact that those weren't the real rules. (She's not the only one -- lots of male characters, like her father Ned and her brother Robb, have the same story arc.) But she gets just as much character development and is really well fleshed out.

I definitely agree that there is a widely used trope of punishing more feminine characters and rewarding tomboys. And that's a problem! But I just don't think that's actually what's happening in ASOIAF. I think a lot of people bring that to the table when they read it -- Sansa's scenes, especially in the first book, are written from the perspective of, well, a twelve-year-old girl who's been raised to believe that as long as she's pretty and submissive then a handsome prince will come and take her away, and I can see this turning off both feminists (I was pretty turned off by it at first) and the kind of people who are like "buhhh stupid girls I want some action!" -- but I think GRRM actually ends up subverting that trope really well. Sansa grows up a lot as the result of her experiences, and becomes a very sympathetic character without shedding her femininity. Arya grows up a lot too -- on some level, she had a lot of the same idealistic views of the world that Sansa did, she just happened to have a different preference about what her role in it should be. But when those views get shattered, she doesn't deal with it any better than Sansa does. They've ended up in about the same psychological place right now, which is basically keeping a low profile while trying to completely forget about their lives as nobility.

Again, I want to emphasize that I don't disagree with the general idea of there being a trope where tomboys are rewarded and feminine characters are punished, or that it's any better than the other way around. Nor do I think that ASOIAF is totally unproblematic, or without sexism. But it seems to me that a lot of the problems that Sady highlights are problems with stereotypical fantasy that are explicitly highlighted and subverted in ASOIAF, for exactly the reasons that Sady points out.

GRRM is trying to show how hideously sexist the stereotypical medieval fantasy world is

to be true, would have to feature female characters who were as human as the men. from this woman's viewpoint, he doesn't. would also have to refrain from treating murder of unfaithful women as tragic for the man. doesn't. would also have to show women operating from within the roles offered them with humanity n intelligence. doesn't: they all rebel against the roles or fail to fulfill them.

depicting ain't subverting. he doesn't show female characters same respect as men.

And this is a personal taste thing, but: I kind of hate deconstructions that way.

Yes, I know that Uber-Realistic Medieval World would have involved sexism, racism, bad teeth, bad hygiene, and abundant death everywhere. Yes, I know that real pirates were horrible rapey individuals, and actual kids piloting mecha would have had psychological problems out the wazoo and blah blah blah. I'm not an idiot; I know how it works in real life; I just don't *care*. Real life is real life. When I read, I want to have fun. Pretty much none of the above is fun.

And there's a fine line between "I'm going to try and do a realistic take on tropes XYZ, because hey, why not" and "depressing gritty hyper-accuracy is the only way to go; anyone who prefers a more idealized take on their entertainment is a deluded fool". My experience is that Martin tends to stay on the right side of that line*, but if "He's not saying that rape is a good thing, he's saying that it's something that happened a lot in medieval-type societies, and stereotypical fantasy is *bad* for glossing over it so much." is really true, if he puts certain scenes in his books because he's Trying to Send a Message about how awful the ways other people write medieval fantasy are, then he can go fuck himself.

I know what happened a lot in medieval-type societies; I know what happens a lot in our society; I don't consider any type of entertainment "bad" for choosing not to deal with it. I don't consider entertainment bad for choosing *to* deal with it either, unless the dealing-with is done badly, but getting all snotty "Well, *actually*, the world was sexist and horrible, in case you didn't know..."

This is reminding me of Poe's Law, which of course says that any sufficiently advanced parody of trollishnes can be indistinguishable from the idea it is parodying.

And yet, that's not something to aspire to in literature. A deconstruction means more -- as Kit says -- than just doing the same things only being darker and grittier. Rape is bad, yes, but I don't think it's subversive to portray it as painful and harmful, because we already have lots of books that do that. Dialing it up to 11 isn't going to make a point here.

For me, though, the author lost the good intentions war with the Orientalism that the article points out. Having a European girl show up to "the East" and say "rape is bad, ya'll!" so they can be all "really? we didn't realize, thx!" is problematic on so many levels. I'm not even sure what that could be legitimately trying to deconstruct; the many fantasy books that portray Eastern nations as awesome, advanced, intelligent societies? *lolsob*

Ana: " For me, though, the author lost the good intentions war with the Orientalism that the article points out. "

Yeah, the depiction of the Dothraki is really pretty bad, no arguments there.

Izzy: With the latest book, I think GRRM has actually crossed the line into "depressing gritty hyper-accuracy". And yeah, "in real life, this would never work that way!" is not something people need to be reminded of all the time, and That Guy can get pretty annoying. But what can I say, I enjoyed this one (well, at least the first three books).

Kit: "to be true, would have to feature female characters who were as human as the men. from this woman's viewpoint, he doesn't. would also have to refrain from treating murder of unfaithful women as tragic for the man. doesn't. would also have to show women operating from within the roles offered them with humanity n intelligence. doesn't: they all rebel against the roles or fail to fulfill them, never successfully adapt to them.

depicting ain't subverting. he doesn't show female characters same respect as men. "

This is true! I think he succeeds at it a bit more than you do, but yeah, I absolutely agree that there are problems with his female characters. As I said before, there aren't competent female rulers -- I *think* Daenerys is supposed to be one, but...yeah, she ends up failing in all the stereotypically feminine ways, and it's really aggravating. I do think he shows some women adapting well to their roles -- the women of the Tyrell family come to mind, when they're matching up Margaery with Joffrey -- but certainly those women are very few and far between, and none of them are POV characters. I'm not as concerned about the murder of unfaithful women being tragic for the man -- I think it's possible to have it be tragic for them and still be a terrible, monstrous thing, and I think he does that. I also think it's important to depict people who have a conscience as still being capable of evil things. But I can totally see the argument that the event you're talking about goes way beyond that, and I may be reading my own preconceptions into the text here.

I have issues with the way Martin handles sexual violence, and with his world-building in general, but I do like the books. I also like many of his female characters. I like Catelyn, and Sansa, and Margaery's loony grandmother, I even like Cersei. She's a fun villain. I like Asha. I even like Brienne--although mostly because Jaime reacts so badly to her.

-The endless discussion of rape gets dull, and sounds like the author's voice, not that of someone in the world of the books. There are points where Martin means to be shocking, and I'm thinking, 'this isn't a MOTIVATOR for someone from this sort of culture. This wouldn't be this formal or explicit'.-The whole thing with Lady Tanda's daughter was ridiculous.-The sexual mores of Westeros are somewhat contradictory (which is not necessarily unrealistic), but never entirely convincing to me. This obsession of Lord Tywin's with keeping Tyrion away from loose women? Why? What's it to him?-I'm intrigued that there is absolutely no discussion/portrayal of sexual violence toward men. There's one brief and contemptuous mention of a priest who 'likes little boys', and the only threat of sexual violence toward a male is actually aimed at Arya, who is in one of her boy phases. Heck, there's no discussion of sex between men at all, of whatever consensuality. I'm really supposed to believe that there's a convenient town with a brothel where the men of the Night's Watch show up on the down low, and nothing sexual ever develops between members of an all-male society freezing their asses off on the Final Frontier?

-Everyone is too young. This is not merely about sex, either. Men are frequently described as winning tournaments and fighting in battles before puberty, or just after. Martin has clearly read some medieval accounts and not realized, or perhaps cared, that when a fourteen-year-old boy bests knights twice his age at a tournament, it's because he's the prince and it's a set piece, and that most medieval armies tried to keep young boys out of combat. Boys were starting their work as squires at thirteen or so, not becoming knights. That was for when you were in your later teens at the earliest, unless it was a political knighthood. Physically, it's ridiculous. A boy who isn't done growing can't use these sorts of weapons effectively against grown men.

I'm torn on the Orientalism/Danaerys front. I can see the outline of what people object to, (blondest human being in the universe teaches the savages), OTOH, Danaerys clearly did not get her ideas from home, where rape in wartime is routine, nor from her brother, who has the ethics of a particularly evil toad, and is really the only person to have raised her. But she is in a rather unique position--she's an idealistic thirteen-year-old with a kind heart, and a certain amount of power through her husband. I don't see Drogo as learning from her that his culture is bad, mmmkay? Rather, I think he enjoys letting his wife do what she wants, and everyone else can suck it up.

I'm not even sure what that could be legitimately trying to deconstruct; the many fantasy books that portray Eastern nations as awesome, advanced, intelligent societies?

The argument I've heard is that it's deconstructing the 'young person becomes ruler, sticks to their advanced value system even though everyone says it will fail, wins by sheer pluck'. Daenerys becomes queen at 14, tries to impose her values on a foreign culture, and ends up with a huge rebellion against her.

Personally, I think a lot of these sorts of arguments are based on abstracting the story to the point where none of the deeply problematic features of the actual text appear. Because that first paragraph I wrote is, strictly speaking, kind of true to the depiction of the books. But it has elided the hypersexual dark-skinned people and their insistence on savagery and their love of bloodsports. One can accurately say that Tirion's story is about the cruelties of family relationships and the horrors of violently enforced gender roles, but first you have to cut out all that stuff about the objectification of women to the point where no one blinks twice at Tirion strangling a prostitute for not being loyal to him. One can say that Cersei's story is about people who hunger for power alienating everyone who could have been an ally to them, but first you have to ignore that she's the woman who most consistently points out how horrendously sexist the world is and refuses to play by those rules.

Kit formulated exactly my problem: GRRM is writing against a straw-world. He is exaggerating the nature of his targets to make his Big Realistic Points and doesn't appear to notice his own gross biases spewing all over the page.

If GRRM does see himself as writing deconstruction, then he's setting his sights too low. If he wants to talk about how unrealistic Traditional Fantasy is, if he wants to make a Serious Point about the way reality works, then he should be doing reconstruction, showing the ways that women might successfully get by in a hypersexist world, showing how a foreign leader might actually earn the respect and loyalty of a nation. Deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction is not automatically progressive.

And I don't think I'm fabricating the interpretations of readers, because they show up to Explain how the books are meant to be read, and they will happily pile on the vileness. I haven't and don't really expect to finish Dance With Dragons, but I'm told that after 4.5 books of being hated, Cersei is the victim of sexual abuse as a humiliation tactic, and loses a lot of gathered power. And I have had readers explain to me that this had to happen because we all hated Cersei so much and now that she's been punished she can start being sympathetic and redeemable.

He's creating a world in which it's okay to hate the things that it's socially unacceptable to hate in reality, and throwing misdirection over the whole thing by calling it a deconstruction.

But what can I say, I enjoyed this one (well, at least the first three books)

Oh, for sure! They're well-written, and they are enjoyable reads for people who aren't me--problematic content doesn't make something bad, necessarily. (I still do like most of the Narnia books, for example.) And I don't know that Martin is going in with the I'll Show You How It Really Works attitude: it's just, if he is, I'm going to think a lot less of him. Much he cares, of course. ;)

I can see why people like the books--a lot of my friends love them--and I think they're good from an objective viewpoint. Just not my thing, and the Dark Grittification of everything ever in the sf arena does get on my nerves from time to time, though Martin's no more to blame for that than New!BSG was.

I think the Dothraki are supposed to be an example of a society that has all the traditional hallmarks of savagery (hypersexual, violent, dark-skinned, etc) that nevertheless ends up being "better" than the non-savage society. But it doesn't work, because the way that they're shown as "better" is that Daenerys ends up really liking them, which just comes across as Stockholm syndrome.

And yes, in the fifth book Cersei is literally in-world punished for her "sins" via sexual abuse as humiliation, and it's really pretty disgusting. There's no way around that. I think the real problem with Cersei is that she's never shown as being *good* at rebelling against her role -- I'd be more willing to write a lot of the sexual stuff off if she was also shown to be intelligent and good at governing instead of being petty and malicious. But she isn't. I do think part of this is GRRM's apparent philosophy of "depressing gritty hyper-accuracy", as Izzy put it, but in Cersei's case it's pretty misogynist. I do like Asha as a partial counter to Cersei -- Asha is unabashedly sexual, is trusted to be in charge, and is also quite competent -- but she doesn't get much screen time.

There's one brief and contemptuous mention of a priest who 'likes little boys'

This was actually the part where I put Dance With Dragons down with no intent to pick it back up. I mean, why? Honest to Yog, what is that about? Tirion makes sarcastic reference to a 'proper priest' being someone gluttonous who sexually abuses little boys, rather than getting involved in politics. Where did he get that stereotype? There's no indication in the previous books that such abuses are common in the Church of the Seven. No talk of scandals or endemic problems or coverups. It's just GRRM throwing in a (wrong, malicious) stereotype from reality as a wink to the reader. He might as well have had Jon Snow make a reference to Jersey Shore. What in the hell.

One of my big "no, you cannot do this and remain a sympathetic/heroic character" buttons is violence against a partner or ex-partner for being unfaithful. Well, violence against a partner or ex in general, but then we have a lot of media saying it's okay if they were cheating, and...no. No, it is not, and it won't be, and shut the fuck up, Carrie Underwood, oh my God.

Deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction is not automatically progressive.

word.

see, you want kudos for showing misogyny?

gotta come across like you -care- about misogyny.

can't treat rape like a casual plot device, cos it's not a casual experience for most women. may be casual for the rapist, but that's a bad thing.

gotta have respect n compassion for women, not willy-wave about how compassion is for mugs and girly to boot. that's what men who bully women say.

gotta take partner violence really seriously, not treat it like the foible of a decent guy. that is the batterer's excuse. is such bullshit.

gotta see women as fully human, even if that makes yr book about yr sexist society less fun. not fun is no fun. cannot have it both ways.

otherwise yr not pro-women. yr competing with other men -over- women n stepping on us in the rush. yr trying to be mississippi burning man. yr That Guy.

if you don't respect the targets of a prejudice, you do not get to be the guy who deconstructs it. because really, you don't understand what you're talking about. not gritty either. real grit chafes male asses as much as female ones.

About A Song of Ice and Fire -- meh, I got a couple books in and then got bored. I just don't find fighting for thrones and politicking to be all that interesting and couldn't get invested in any of the characters. I did like the doggies and Bran and Jon Snow and the ice zombies, and I wondered if there might be a metaphor in there somewhere about how we get so caught up with stupid politics that we ignore the ICE ZOMBIES INVADING FROM THE NORTH but mostly I was just bored. If there had been more ice zombies and less politicking, I would've kept reading.

I can't add anything to the GRRM discussion, since I haven't read the books or seen the television show, and nothing I have heard gives me the slightest inclination to start.

So... if I learned anything from medieval sermons, it was: when you have nothing to say, it's time for a little allegory!

Pevensies and weapons...

Let's start out by pointing out that Aslan is obviously a solar deity; lions are traditionally associated with the sun, with their golden color and their manes radiating like the sun's rays. More to the point, Aslan is specifically Sol Invictus, since he is slain at midwinter and SPOILER arises to bring the Spring.

As a solar deity, he is associated (in Greco-Roman tradition, with which Lewis was mostly working) with patriarchy (duh), rationality, law, (bad) poetry, prophecy, healing

Peter, the eldest of the Pevensies, is given a sword and shield. The sword is an obvious phallic symbol, and the fact that it is drawn by Peter (the "stone") may be an allusion to his right to kingship. Peter is always the voice of reason and the final authority, deferring only to Aslan. The shield is decorated with the Lion, in the colors of gold (alluding again to the solar alignment) and red -- this may be the rising or setting sun, but considering that it is a lion rampant, and spring is on the way, almost certainly a rising sun.

So Peter's gifts place his allegiance fully with the Sun / Son of the Emperor; his will be the rule of (male) Men, of authority, law, and justice.

Lucy's gifts also place her firmly in Aslan's camp. She is named after the "little Light", the morning star that heralds the rising sun. As such, she receives a dagger, another phallic symbol, but a diminished one, since she is more "like a boy than a man." Her other gift is the gift of healing, explicitly tied in-text to the flowers of the Sun.

But Susan's gifts are different. While archery can be associated with the sun's rays, this is the noonday sun, the source of madness and plague. More likely her bow is to tie her to the crescent moon, whose arrows bring sleep and dreams -- and confusion. Her horn is also a crescent moon, and the "help" promised is ambiguous. Her name means "lily", another referrent to the pale light of the full moon. The moon and the lily are also female symbols, sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic to the Sun.

They are also symbols of "chastity", but this is not the celibacy of the female who puts her sexuality under the dominion of the patriarchal power. This is the female sexuality which owes nothing to men -- sometimes asexual, sometimes homoerotic, sometimes violently aggressive, taking and devouring the male.

(Note that the two times we see Susan shooting her arrows, she is successful at shooting down the golden apples of the Sun, but is remarkably reluctant to shoot the bear, the companion of the moon-goddess. )

I think part of the reason that Lucy can be a good tomboy is her age. Young girls can want to be Just Like A Boy and it's cute and admirable, but an older girl acting like a man becomes unnatural--we see that even today, where a little girl who says she never wants to marry a boy, ew gross, and anyway she is just going to go play in the dirt is cute, but grownup woman (or older teen) who says the same thing [you can substitute "paying football at school" for the dirt if you want] is suspect. Part of the reason young female protagonists can be just as good as the boys is because they're going to grow out of it (except of course Lucy dies first, ooooops).

Which is just another way the patriarchy screws everyone over of course. :( Susan is damned if she does and damned if she doesn't.

Re: female characters in misogynistic times, I think a good example of Getting It Right is Downton Abbey. It's set around WWI in England, so definitely a problematic time, but the woman are still realistic, well-drawn and sympathetic characters. It helps that there are a number of them, and that they react to their status in different ways, from fighting it to excepting it to subversively working from it to basically saying "Other women should but I am too good for that." Which is one of the places I think GRRM fails.

Too much to respond to, and I'm not arguing that ASOIAF (what an acronym) is a completely non-misogynistic work. I'm inclined to give Martin more credit than some for treating women as people and not plot devices, but there's no denying the problems-- for instance, I liked Asha too, but her sex scene early in the book was pure WTF?

Cersei's chapter was completely revolting too; but although her ordeal is tramatic for her, it doesn't in fact break her. She's clearly going to go on scheming and plotting just as much as ever. She may be more sympathetic, but she's a long way from being "redeemed" or repentant. For that matter, the main instigator of her punishment meets a sticky end in the very next chapter, and serves him right.

But I can't deny that there's far too much laboring the point. In fact, there's getting too be too much of everything in these books, except for the ice zombies that there aren't enough of. Character development and timeline synchronicity and detailed worldbuilding are all very well, but can we get on with the plot?

And until we do, I'm reserving judgment about Tyrion.

Makabit: Heck, there's no discussion of sex between men at all, of whatever consensuality.Renly Baratheon and Ser Loras? Satin, a former male prostitute (and yet another victim of sexual abuse)? I admit, though, that such cases are few and far between, and that much more is implied than said, in either case; the manly men of Westeros are uncomfortable about acknowledging that such things happen. And yeah, that remark of Tyrion's totally out of left field, another WTF moment.

Kit: what if martin wrote a boy who loved epics and had romantic ideas about knighthood based on his favourite books, an was consequently raped and beaten 7 ways from sunday for being such a sap?

There are young men who believe the stories and fail ingloriously and painfully-- Quentyn Martell, Ser Loras, Lancel Lannister, Robb Stark...and the curious case of Theon Greyjoy. Not that the story he believed was a romance, but he tried to turn himself into a saga-style Viking hero, and was consequently raped and beaten 7 ways from Sunday.

In fact, by this point, most of the population of Westeros seems to be suffering from PTSD, and who could blame them?

I haven't gotten past the middle of Book Three, bear in mind--but does Renly and Loras ever become canon? So far, all I'm getting to support the idea that they're an item (something I got from the show), is a hint that Loras has gone into the Kingsguard because he lost--someone. Maybe Renly, but I wouldn't know that if the show hadn't planted the idea.

Yes, there are a scattered few references, I overstate, but it seems striking to me that regardless of how the society feels about homosexuality, there's so little on it, considering the, er, high volume of heterosexual behavior going down. And some of this may be wishful thinking--I do love medieval gay boys so.

I must say, I'm enjoying the hell out of the series. I must confess to a great fondness for Theon--something about him, in all his awfulness, makes me very happy.

I also feel it necessary, for no particular reason, to mention that the actor who plays Peter Pevensie in the movie of LWW--the most recent one, I mean--was described by one of my students (twelve, African American) as being 'the cutest white boy I ever saw'.

I haven't gotten past the middle of Book Three, bear in mind--but does Renly and Loras ever become canon?Ooops, sorry, I hope I haven't been too spoilerific. I haven't seen the show, so everything I say refers to the books. I can't remember how well the Renly/Loras relationship is developed there, but I have the impression that it's understood but not discussed.

But it's been years-- what is it, six years since the last book -- and I am not enough of a fan to go back and re-read all those thousands of pages before starting on DWD, so I may be mis-remembering. And you're right, of course, even if it is canon, one relationship doesn't begin to balance all that aggressive heterosexuality discussed in detail.

As for Theon, if he's a favorite of yours, all I will say is to brace yourself before you begin on Book Five.

Thank you again for that Tiger Beatdown link. Wonderful post; loved it.

I find the whole discussion of Tyrion fascinating. Apparently he's a fan favorite because while he *did* technically brutalize a woman (his wife?!) in a 50+ rape pile-on, it's not his *fault* because his father "made" him do it. ("Made" in scare quotes because I don't fully understand the nature of the making.)

And yet apparently he thinks slavery is AWESOME because everyone who is a slave CHOOSES to be a slave by virtue of the fact that they haven't killed themselves. Um.

While I hesitate to apply his logic to any one or any thing, given that it's "logic" that is henious, disingenuous, ridiculous, henious, failtastic, and henious, I can't resist pointing out that Tyrion can never complain about anything ever and ESPECIALLY can't use his father as an excuse for why he brutalizes women, because, hey, he could always kill himself instead.

Maybe GRRM is trying to make that point... I don't know... but I'm not a big fan of making excuses in-text to justify rape and slavery. :/

Renly/Loras is only ever subtext in the books, and was confirmed only by direct word of GRRM. I hear it was promoted to on-screen canon in the TV show.

Apparently he's a fan favorite because while he *did* technically brutalize a woman (his wife?!) in a 50+ rape pile-on, it's not his *fault* because his father "made" him do it. ("Made" in scare quotes because I don't fully understand the nature of the making.)

Tyrion is fan favourite because he's been nice to other favoured characters and he has a moderate sense of humour that others are lacking. The part where he participates in the rape of his wife is 'forced' in the sense that he's told to do it and he's been abused in the past so presumably refusing will result in more beateings. The part where he murders a prostitute as a warm-up to killing his (evil) father tends to be ignored entirely.

For bonus points, the rape of his wife is basically treated as irrelevant to her when Tyrion thinks she's also a prostitute, and is treated as all the more evil when it turns out that she actually wasn't. Because apparently it's not rape if she's a whore.

I never got as far as the 'slaves choos slavery by not committing suicide' bit.

Pthalo, love the xkcd. It made me worry that the ocean would disappear entirely though. :P

Hapax, love the philosophy, BUT! :D

As you say, arrows are associated with the sun: the sun god Apollo is just as much a patron of archery as his moon sister is. And Apollo has female handmaidens in his temples: Cassandra, in some versions of her myth, is a priestess of Apollo, and -- of course -- the Oracle at Delphi is associated with him as well, given that he is god of prophecy. And, indeed, we've already noted that Susan -- when she speaks at all -- speaks sensible truths, such as reminding the other children that they need food to survive, and diving that it is good and just to borrow the fur coats.

Perhaps Susan is like Cassandra in that she accepted the gifts of prophecy and wisdom, but refused to submit her body and will to a demanding god, and now she is doomed to tell truths that her siblings will no longer listen to: that their obsession with Narnia will get them all killed.

I've never really understood the school of thought that grim n' gritty is superior to light and fluffy, or, sillier still, more realistic. Reality has plenty of both and plenty of things too improbable to put in any story. Fiction is fiction, and verisimilitude matters far more than any attempt to be realistic (especially as, as someone said, reality is unrealistic). If a person likes grim n' gritty, fine. If they want to write it, fine. But if GRRM really does think he's somehow showing the world by deconstructing fluffy, that rather lowers my opinion of him. So, I'm pretty much with Izzy, there.

His books are massively Not My Thing, so I haven't read them. (That doesn't mean I think they're bad, that means I think they are massively Not My Thing.) However, this idea that he's deconstructing how sexist "stereotypical fantasy" would really be strikes me as way off the mark. Are a lot of fantasy novels actually sexist? Yes. How is making yet another one pointing anything out, exactly? Not only that, but rape is really frickin' common in fantasy novels. Including theoretically fluffy fantasy (such as Mercedes Lackey). So I'm not seeing how he's made a deconstruction of either of these things. It sounds to me like his biggest change from the typical of fantasy (besides having, at least theoretically, an anyone can die stance) is that he's put the smelliness back in.

Again, there's nothing wrong with writing or liking grim darkness, I just don't see it as superior and special. It's just another taste in fiction. And if you write a story with a lot of sexism in it, people are going to call you on your sexism. Even if you meant (or claim to mean) it as a deconstruction.

(I'm really trying to be fair, so I apologize for the leaking snarkiness about grim n' gritty. I've just had my own preferences bashed so often by people who hold grim n' gritty supposed realism up as superior that it's hard not to sneer back at them.)

Tyrion is definitely messed up, no question about it. He's a fan favorite because he's got a sense of humor and rather more of a brain than most of the cast (also, he can fix the drains when they're stopped up, shades of Miles Vorkosigan), but he's still a mess. Like almost everyone else, one way or another. He knows it, too.

MILD SPOILERS ......

A good deal of Book Five, although far too concerned with travel logistics (if this keeps up, I'm gonna start looking around for Buck Williams or Rayford Steele) has Tyrion traveling incognito in the aftermath of those murders, and finding out what life is like for a person of his appearance (dwarfish and noseless) without the protection of family name and family money. He's very definitely a work in progress, which is why I reserve judgment until I see where Martin is going with him. If I live so long.

It may be worth noting that the slavery comment was not meant to indicate that SLAVERY IS AWESOME, but that most people would choose slavery over death if those are the only available choices. Also, although I can't remember the exact chronology, when he says it he's either a slave himself or a recently escaped slave. And as a slave, he chose to obey and keep quiet rather than be beaten for insolence; he chose to wear the slave collar rather than kill himself.

And he wouldn't have been captured and sold in the first place if he hadn't been misbehaving in yet another brothel.

I remember a tossed-off one-liner where Tyrion wonders whether the life of an Eastern slave with a decent master is any worse than the life of a low-born servant back home in the west, where the lords can treat the peasantry pretty much as they please. So, is he going to leave it at that as The Way Things Are, or, if Tyrion ever regains significant power back in Westeros, is he going to drag its feudal society kicking and screaming into some kind of proto-Enlightenment attempt at The Rights of Man, and maybe even of Woman? Remains to be seen, that is, if the ice zombies leave anyone alive to worry about it.

I try not to read Martin's author interviews. From what I have seen, he does have rather an "I'm the only one doing it right" attitude, and I'm not impressed. I'd rather just read the books for themselves and leave it at that.

ASOIAF:At some point it occurred to me that, had all hell not broken loose, Sansa's skill set of embroidery, knowledge of the aristocracy, etc. would have been a far more useful skill set than Arya's swinging of swords. There's a lot of gender role stuff between the two girls, but maybe a certain amount of practicality as well. Is Sansa the equivalent of the girl who heads to college on a career path and Arya the equivalent of a girl who decides to support herself writing novels? One of these paths is more likely to get the rent paid on time, always a consideration for those of us who like to live in a house.

But of course all hell breaks loose and Arya's combat ability suddenly becomes useful-- though not MUCH, because she's twelve and anyway everyone in the whole series is destined for grievous bodily harm, psychological torment, and Anyone Can Die-ism.

I always assumed all the kids had been given a combat boost by Destiny just so they could fight at ALL. Maybe it's not a magic bow, but a symbol that Destiny has juiced up Susan's archery skills and Santa didn't want to take the time to explain? In the books the kids are never seen practicing, though they do in the movie-- it's a cute scene, Susan is shooting at the target and then Lucy THROWS that little dagger, proving that she's able to kick some butt after all. The movie does improve a lot of what's wrong with the book.

I wish Lewis had written something down about his writing process re: Susan's final fate. When did he decide that one of the kids wouldn't make it? When did he decide who it would be? Why her rather than someone else? Why couldn't they all get in? I guess I'm wondering if he thought about it as a writer deciding that it'd be unrealistic to have everybody survive, or if he had the Making A Religious Point first in his mind and what point he was going for exactly... sadly, short of a seance we'll never know.

... all thoughts banished by a small earthquake and my subsequent need to hide under my desk for the rest of the night. x_x

First off, the wardrobe portal to Narnia is not consistently open, and in fact, I get the impression that it is almost never open. It doesn't always work for the Pevensies; they're told at the end of the book (I think-- I don't have it with me) that they won't be able to use it again; and if the wardrobe had ever been observed to open onto a winterscape before their arrival, I doubt it would have been left unlocked and used to store garments. Toss it in the ocean and I don't see much if any water ever getting through.

Second, supposing you could brace the portal open by some additional magic, there's the time difference, which is also not consistent, but it seems that Narnia time always goes much faster than Earth time. If the portal were open and submerged while the Pevensies reigned at Cair Paravel, for instance, that would be four hours of flow Earth-time trickling through over 20 years in Narnia-time. It might make a brook.

I wish Lewis had written something down about his writing process re: Susan's final fate. When did he decide that one of the kids wouldn't make it? When did he decide who it would be? Why her rather than someone else? Why couldn't they all get in?

think that's why it feels so spiteful. it happens rather suddenly for reasons off-stage. it's as if he assumes we'll all agree lipstick is so bad nothing more needs to be said. but if you damn a character you should give proper in-story reasons, not lean on out-of-story assumptions. souls are worth more than that.

As a fan of Tyrion, I feel obligated to provide a bit more context for the events he's being condemned for. The prostitute he murders (Shae) had been his mistress for quite some time beforehand, and while we're never sure whether her affection for him is real or faked, he believed himself in love with her. And then at his treason trial she showed up as a character witness and retold the whole story of their relationship, distorted to paint him as an evil little monster who hates all that is good. And then he finds her in his whore-hating father's bed. I'm not saying he's right to kill her, or that she isn't an unlucky woman doing the best she can with the hand she's dealt, but it's unfair to just sum it up as "he killed her for disloyalty, the author hates women".

And the whole deal with his first wife being gang-raped at his father's command? Tyrion was in his early teens at the time. He'd met a peasant girl who seemed to genuinely like him, and married her on impulse, and his father decided he needed to be taught a lesson. I always thought Tyrion was written as using "well, she was a whore" to pretend to himself that it wasn't massively traumatic for her, even while knowing full well it must have been.

In non-Tyrion-related matters, the Renly/Loras relationship was not at all obvious to me when I first read the books, but after seeing it in the show I re-read the books and there were indeed hints at it. Renly's marriage to Loras's sister Margaery gets comments like "Oh, she came to your bed a virgin? In your bed she'll likely stay one." But the hints are scarce enough that you have to be paying attention to notice.

I'm not sure how the context you provided is supposed to change non-fans' negative opinion of him, if that's what you wanted to do.

>>>it's unfair to just sum it up as "he killed her for disloyalty, the author hates women".

Hm, I thought people's arguments were more like "this author's universe strikes me as very misogynic because of this, and that, and also that. Not to mention that", not like "one male character killed one female character, now I'm going to call author a misogynist!"

plus - t isn't a person, he's a character. the problem is m went to such lengths, more than once, to make us pity a rapist/murderer more than his victims.

the 'extenuating circumstances' are *part of the problem*.

it's not 'man kills woman, author bad.' it's 'author works hard to make man killing/raping/abusing woman seem excusable, over an over again'.

abusers always think they have a reason. making up reasons to excuse characters is not understanding an abuser's viewpoint, it's swallowing his excuses. which is why partner violence is so seldom stopped or punished.

Otherwise, I get that you feel for these characters as if they’re people — that’s what fiction does — but I feel that you may be talking too much about them as if they ARE people, instead of taking the lens that these are women, created by a man, for specific narrative purposes. Often, when we say “why” a character does something, we give the character’s stated reasons for it: “Dany ‘frees’ the slaves because she has empathy for them.” Yes. Sure. That is the justification given in the text. But what we are saying, from another angle, is “George R. R. Martin chose to create a white character who overthrows civilizations of color and cures their barbarism, which is a popular racist narrative that has created X, Y, and Z consequences, and he has chosen to tell us that this is a ‘compassionate’ thing to do.” Dany’s overthrowing the whole Eastern continent isn’t that much different from the justifications George W. Bush gave for his wars and invasions in our “the East”: “We have to overthrow their governments to Save Them and Bring Democracy and Teach Them A Better Way because their practices are Barbaric.” But we all know that wasn’t a benevolent action, one would assume, and that in practice this “benevolent” crusade to save the cultural Other only created and reinforced more racism against that Other. Do you see what I’m saying?

It's funny how many authors have to be "avoided" in order that they not ruin their books. :( Yeah. :(

there's nothing wrong with writing or liking grim darkness, I just don't see it as superior and special. It's just another taste in fiction.I just wish people would stop sneering at other people's tastes. There's nothing better about grim'n'gritty, but there's nothing worse either. Who wants to read all the same kind of thing, all the time?

I finally got around to reading that TigerBeat piece, and I admit that it's funny and has more than a grain of truth. But it's not the whole story; it's based on a fairly superficial reading. Off the top of my head, for instance, she says that Cersei is condemned for sleeping around while her husband isn't. Not exactly: Robert gets away with it, for a while, because he's the man and especially because he's the king. But he's pretty explicitly portrayed as a mediocre king, a bad husband and an inattentive father, and yes, the people around him know it, and yes, his failures bring him to a a painful early end.

(Not to mention one of my pet peeves, which is the way that she dismisses every action taken by a woman who is a mother as "She only did it for the babeez, so it doesn't count!" But I've done that rant before.)

Anyway, it's fine to not like something because you don't like it; it's also fine to criticize something for failures of style or plot or characterization or implication. I don't think it's fine to take a superficial reading, without context or nuance, and extrapolate from that that the author is a creep and that anyone who likes the books is either too stupid to notice or a conniver in creepiness.

P.S.: I did not read the comments. If they're full of creepy Martin fans, I don't want to know.

I just wish people would stop sneering at other people's tastes. There's nothing better about grim'n'gritty, but there's nothing worse either. Who wants to read all the same kind of thing, all the time?

i like grit. i just think m's is not actually gritty, just aggressive, and not well done.

I just wish people would stop sneering at other people's tastes. There's nothing better about grim'n'gritty, but there's nothing worse either. Who wants to read all the same kind of thing, all the time?

Just to be clear, I did not say there was anything worse about grim n' gritty. Saying it's not superior or special is not the same as saying it's inferior. I really don't give a damn what other people like, I'm just sick of hearing it is superior and special, and what I like is stupid and bad.

And plenty of people on both sides of the fence do indeed want to read the same kind of thing all the time.

The prostitute he murders (Shae) had been his mistress for quite some time beforehand, and while we're never sure whether her affection for him is real or faked, he believed himself in love with her. And then at his treason trial she showed up as a character witness and retold the whole story of their relationship, distorted to paint him as an evil little monster who hates all that is good. And then he finds her in his whore-hating father's bed. I'm not saying he's right to kill her, or that she isn't an unlucky woman doing the best she can with the hand she's dealt, but it's unfair to just sum it up as "he killed her for disloyalty, the author hates women".

Let's try this from Shae's perspective. She meets Tyrion, who has wealth and power and offers her stability and protection in exchange for affection. Selling affection is her job. She goes for it. Later, Tyrion is thrown on trial, losing all ability to protect her, and she is in the hands of a man who is known to consider prostitutes completely expendable. Shae acts to protect herself and does what the more powerful guy demands.

Basically, as soon as Tyrion was captured, Shae was dead. Either Tywin would kill her for refusing to lie, or Tyrion would kill her for lying. Tyrion's position is "I am going to kill you for not dying for me, former employee! I hired you and loved you and you didn't love me back!"

I don't think the fact that Tyrion killed her is proof that the author hates women. I think the fact that Tyrion killed her and the author thinks we should all be okay with that is worth contemplating.

I did not read the comments. If they're full of creepy Martin fans, I don't want to know.

The creepy Martin fans are part of the thing, though - if it's true that GRRM is actually trying to subvert things and present women as equal people and so forth, then a huge portion of his fanbase is missing the point. I know authors can't be responsible for who likes their books, but some definitive commentary along the lines of "I'm actually writing about horrible people and occasionally I get creeped out that readers don't seem to notice how wrong the characters are" would be nice.

Second, supposing you could brace the portal open by some additional magic, there's the time difference, which is also not consistent, but it seems that Narnia time always goes much faster than Earth time. If the portal were open and submerged while the Pevensies reigned at Cair Paravel, for instance, that would be four hours of flow Earth-time trickling through over 20 years in Narnia-time. It might make a brook.

The exact processes are up for debate, because Magic, but it's obviously not a straightforward dividing line where time is passing faster on one side than the other. If it were, there would be horrible effects on people passing through the portal - if it really was 4 hours:20 years, that would mean Narnia time was passing at... 43800 times the rate of Earth time. In the moment where your front foot is in Narnia and your heart is not, it will wait... approximately twelve hours for the next heartbeat to send fresh blood its way. (Bringing a whole new sense of danger to those who

The simplest way to get around this, of course, is to have the portal only send things through in whole parts, via a sort of magical 'pressurisation chamber'. A person steps through the portal, their whole body gets accelerated to Narnia time, and off they go. The question then becomes whether the portal will recognise 'the ocean' as a single body or a collection of discrete water particles and flora and fauna. In the latter case, yes, it's a trickle. In the former case, the entire ocean would presumably drain into the wardrobe and then explode all at once into Narnia in what I feel could best be described as 'the Big Bang With Sharks'.

The third option is that when someone is passing through the portal Narnia time slows down to lock with Earth time until they are safely through, then unlocks and goes on its merry speeding way, in which case we might get a situation as described in xkcd.

Once to comment on how the Hermione/adult-characters slash creeped her out because Hermione was like her daughter, and once when she thought it was interesting that a lot of folks preferred her "bad guys" to her good ones.

In the latter case, I thought she was lacking the perspective of the fans - that, say, Snape can be seen as more morally nuanced than the Boy Wonder - but she still spoke up over it, IIRC.

Also, I know I said I'd leave this alone, but it's like an Ana-shaped bug light, my brain keeps flying into it and getting zapped. The slavery thing. The slavery thing? The slavery thing!

I don't... I just... I...! I'm hoping, praying, believing, assuming that the slavery thing is supposed to be, I dunno, Stockholm Syndrome or something and not God's Honest Truth. Slaves are slaves by choice? Slaves are slaves by choice! I mean... *head explode*

Not only is this the ultimate victim blaming argument where EVERYTHING ON EARTH is now the victim's fault (Slave? You could kill yourself. Raped? You could have killed yourself. Social injustice? Don't like it, kill yourself.), it is also the stupidest thing ever uttered ever. For like 15 reasons.

First. It is NOT that easy to kill yourself with common household items lying around, and especially when you don't have the free agency to go pick up some extra stuff at the market. Anyone who thinks suicide is physically easy either hasn't tried it themselves or hasn't talked to someone who has. Research fail.

Second. Even if Fantasy Europe or wherever has eighteen swords and/or pointy sticks per household, it's STILL not easy for a slave to kill themself because usually if you're letting the slaves have unfettered access to the sharp sticks, yur doin it wrong.

Third. Do you know what happens when a slave kills themself? All the other slaves have A REALLY BAD DAY. Remember in school where the teacher would say "Johnny can't stop talking in class so no-one gets recess"? That's how slavery works, only instead of "no recess for a day", it's "no food for a week, but don't worry, the constant beatings will take your mind off the hunger". So if you've got family or friends who are also slaves, this isn't the crackerjack solution that the character *thinks* it is.

Essentially, this "slaves are slaves by choice" notion totally undermines victims as being responsible for everything that happens to them, glorifies and excuses violent oppressors, and only makes logical sense if the speaker is a loner who doesn't care about the safety and security of those left behind. And, again, it means that the speaker can never complain about anything ever again. (I'm reminded of Dooce's delightful Maytag rant that was so much gold.)

Also: historically accurate? No. (All this rape + slavery + historical accuracy stuff is also reminding me of F.A.T.A.L., but if you don't know what that is, don't go and look because you won't like the answer.)

But, like I said, WAY WAY up there, if this is supposed to be Stockholm Syndrome then it's probably a pretty accurate portrayal, so there's that. I'm going to assume that it is. I sure hope so.

The interview I'm thinking of was something like "I don't understand why people like Snape so much; he's not a good guy," or something like that, and I can't remember when in relation to the saga this was said. I think I also saw it second-hand from someone explaining that Snape is interested from a moral dilemma p.o.v., where Harry has pretty much always been destined to be on the side of good. But you're right -- it could be that she understands the perspective intellectually and is just using the term "understands" colloquially to mean she doesn't agree with it.

Also, agreed on the slavery thing. I've noticed that a lot of writers who seem to be, well, a little more privilieged than others tend to see slavery as either "forced unpaid labor" or "forced sex" depending on the context, and they don't understand (or want to understand) that there's way more to slavery than just the hard work and rape.

It's maybe analogous to how women in fiction are frequently defined in terms of their relationships to men; slaves are frequently defined in terms of their relationships to their masters. That needs to change.

Timothy Zahn - not the most emotional of writers - even did better in one novel of a YA series, Dragon & Slave. There was little of the kinds of horrors that slavery actually leads to (abuse of unproductive workers, but still within the relatively comfy bounds of the kind of YA that always ends happily) but he got into the character's head and made it clear: slavery means being hammered every day with the message that you are not a person. You don't deserve anything good, you don't deserve anything at all, you don't have your own thoughts, and you don't connect with other people. You are less than that.

Not quite the same beast as 'Ugh, such a long work day and no breaks'.

On slavery, something else to remember is that it is not a single institution, it changes quite a bit according to the culture and the timeframe. I'm writing a series of novels set in fifteen-century Florence, and dealing with slavery--and remembering that it's according to the lights of their day, not mine, and not the nineteenth-century American version in my head--is both challenging and interesting. An author has a lot of options to play with, if they will do it honestly, and not in the usual fantasy style, where, as someone rightly said, the slave is seen only in relation to the master. That is, if they're not seen as an exotic prop to tell you whatever about the real characters. (That said, also, the point where I almost died of aggravation over a specfic approach to slavery was the new Star Wars movies.)

Has Martin ever said that ASOIAF was supposed to be a deconstruction of the entire fantasy genre? (I say this as someone who's like ASOIAF, but has seen enough of Martin's ramblings to avoid most info dealing with him) I always got the impression this was more a "deconstruction" or at least just a story that doesn't involve The Chosen One (even though it does). Like how upon reading the open chapter of the Wheel of Time, you can already tell that Rand is the Chosen One, Destined to bring balance to the whatever, and will survive all obstacles thrown at him unless the author requires him to make a last minute Hero's Death.

This brings me to Tyrion and Shae. I wrote something and it sounded VERY like I was victim blaming. And I'm not sure how I feel about that. Let me try this again.

Basicaly, Shae followed the bigger power that would be able to protect her. No harm there. What she did, on top of that, was MASSIVELY and PUBLICLY humiliate Tyrion in front of a good portion of the city. Ok, I want to stop here, cause I don't know to finish this without getting into some form of victim blaming, but. . . even putting Shae's profession aside, she wasn't an innocent victim. That's NOT to say that she deserved to die. I also think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. While this killing had a lot to do with revenge, if she hadn't been there, or if someone else had, I think Tyrion wouldn't have killed her/killed that other person.

I also think this is apart of a subset of the above Chosen One, where people don't think in Black and White.

Now, this doesn't even begin to address the flaws, and mysogyny and Orientalism of Martin's world (seriously, why would a warrior society think it's cool to kill off your own members during party functions?). But, like other things, I think Tyrion and Shae are more complicated then that.

P.S. I really liked Sansa. I found her the least Mary Sue of Ned's kids. (well, there's Rickon, but he disappears too early to tell). I wonder how much of her backlash is from rabid fanboys going "EW, you want me to read about a GIRL?! Who does GIRLY STUFF?!!" I see this on nerd communities I frequent when someone pops up and mentions arts/crafts and musicals and things that aren't . . .drinking and God of War. (I also saw it a lot when I hung out in the anime community. Shows aimed for girls tend to be derided no matter how good they are.)

But you're right -- it could be that she understands the perspective intellectually and is just using the term "understands" colloquially to mean she doesn't agree with it.

my 2c - he's presented as a potentially nice person who doesn't take responsibility for his emotional health n succumbs to depression. emo h is a big issue - depression weaves in n out the story - n you could say h faces dep n comes out healthy while s sometimes does the right thing externally n manages to function, but within his own psyche holds on to wounds instead of striving to heal.

if you've had n recovered from mental illness, that's often a big no-no.

Rowen, I appreciate your attempt to explain the situation from Tyrion's point of view, thank you. But I think what I am trying to convey is that a victim doesn't need to be an "innocent" victim in order for their murder to be henious, wrong, and inexcusable.

This may boil down to a question of the philosophy of human nature. I personally am not a fan of the idea that public humiliation, adultery, etc. can "push" a man so far that he can't help but murder the person doing the humiliation/betrayal. The fact that she humiliated him is, to me, nothing more than motive. :(

Other people may feel differently than me on this. I'm not sure my philopsophy is the correct one.

I have this whole theory where Snape and Sirius are different sides of the Unable To Get Over High School coin, actually--Snape in the not-letting-go-of-grudges geek way, Sirius in the Glory-Days-living-vicariously way--and the whole point of the later books is that there's a bigger picture and a world beyond high school and you're kind of fucked if you can't move past it.

If they didn't want Snape to be fan-girled, it was probably a mistake to get Alan Rickman to play Snape, at least in retrospect. Heh.

But seriously. I do think that Snape is more interesting than Harry, but I think that about pretty much all the adults in the Potter-verse. This may be related to the fact that I am an adult. And may additionally be related to the fact that IF I READ ONE MORE WORD ABOUT ANGST AND CRUSHES AND SNOGGING, I WILL TEAR MY EYES OUT. Although I suppose not even Snape is safe from that, what with the Lily Longing.

Snape is also, of course, a super-secret double-agent risking his neck in super-secret evil clubhouse meetings, so I can see why some people would find that more interesting than LET'S TALK ABOUT THE WINTER DANCE SOME MORE.

This isn't to say I like Snape, because I don't particularly. I get a little peeved any time I see, "But 'mudblood' wasn't THAT bad of a word to call Lily," because I think it's missing the point of objectifying a human into a reductive, hurtful, utterly unfair concept. I also sometimes wish Rowling would have used a stronger "real" word, something that people actually DO call women and/or minorities in Real Life, except that probably people would miss the point more. Ah well.

Where was I? I can't even remember my point. Something about "I can understand why people might say 'more Snape, less Harry' and yet not agree with Snape or think he's the secret hero". For me, it's more that Harry has a lot of boring in his life, but that's probably because I'm someone who finds pages and pages of dances and crushes tedious.

Does ANYONE in the Potter-verse grow beyond high school? I get that Hogwarts is a bigger thing in the Potter-verse than, say, our usual high school stuff, but it's a little... odd to me to see these families that are so set on their children getting in the SAME house as Mum and Pops.

Then again, I'm fundamentally opposed to the Houses. I want everyone to rotate on a yearly basis and pretty much at random. I feel this very strongly. *blush*

Not much. There is a tremendous amount of tribalism inherent in the very setup of Hogwarts. In fact if one wanted to design an environment that would foster blood essentialism you really couldn't do better.

Here's a question. Are we have this discussion because SHE was murdered, or because she was MURDERED?

Basically, are we having this discussion because Shae was killed by an ex lover in a fit of passion, thus adding to Martin's rather gruesome misogynistic world? in which case I think there are examples that are MUCH clearer. Such as Pia. Or are we having this conversation because Martin is trying to be gruff and gritty and missing the mark by being cavalier about murder, regardless of the gender?

(I'm asking, because I'm seeing a few different ideas being tossed around and not sure which ones to respond to.)

this is just my interpretation, but i see the books as arguing that good moral action n mental stability are linked - voldemort n dementors function much like mental illnesses. snape fights right side of battle but also bullies harry; if more stable, could have done one without other, n prob wld have come in on right side sooner.

just my interpretation. but like the crushes, i think the books treat ordinary life n mental health n non-heroism as the things heroism exists to protect. heroism acts in their service rather than being the purpose of life. hence they have to be important or heroism is just violence.

And: Although I suppose not even Snape is safe from that, what with the Lily Longing.

Yes. I really, really would've liked Snape to have some other motivation than Lifelong Unrequited Crush, then Lifelong Unrequited Crush Plus Extra Guilt. Because I was actually semi-sympathetic toward him until then (sort of, although whatever your trauma is, taking it out on eleven-year-olds and their pets is not cool, dude) at which point he ceased to be interesting and became Creepy OKC Guy.

I can't muster much sympathy for guys whose turn to evil comes from an unwillingness to get over his high school infatuation, and only slightly more for those whose turn back to good comes entirely from her, without ever seeing the bigger picture. It's just...ugh, no. Get over it, dude.

A fair question. My investment in the discussion is that I find it interesting that a man can murder a woman for what is -- as Kit said -- the most common reason that men murder women (disloyalty, humiliation, betrayal) and that man can be seen by a large contingent of fans as not a bad person -- a victim, even -- because of the concept of Protagonist Centered Morality which, at its most brutal, posits that anyone who is mean to a liked character MUST DIE.

Most people aren't so blood-thirsty in real life, of course. But, I do think it helps a lot that the real victim here was (a) a prostitute and (b) a woman -- it makes it a lot easier to brush her murder aside as nothing more than unfortunate when it was really and truly a henious action that should not be excused... and yet, by a lot of people, and possibly the author, is.

'i don't understand' is hardly a huge criticism. she's entitled to her opinion like everyone else.

We may be talking to different interviews -- I brought up the "I don't understand" interviews, but I've heard of others where Rowling was more critical. She seems pretty fiercely invested in how her characters are interpreted. That may be what was being referenced here. And of course that's kind of a controversial subject.

This is, in fact, something that was a major problem during the HP e-book roll-out announcement. Rowling's team stated that they wanted everyone to have the "same experience" (or something similar) to the books, and it sounded like they wanted the books to look the same on all devices. This is neither possible nor desirable, and a lot of fans feared this meant PDF books only.

The team backed down, so whether it was just poor phrasing or logic prevailing I'm not sure, but I do think Rowling has been critical of fans in the past. Not in the GRRM "I can watch football if I want to" way, of course. :P

I should start linking to stuff, but I'm on the TINIEST NETBOOK IN THE WORLD at the moment. :/

I just wrote a terribly long response, and then about halfway through I realized something:

If Tyrion were the 'main character', or 'the hero', or 'the author/reader stand-in', if this were the story of Tyrion Lannister, I would undoubtedly find his murder of Shae, and whatever justification he makes (I'm not up to that part, but I cannot say this spoiler surprsed me much) intolerable and unreadable.

But this is not that kind of book, because it is a series of voices. Tyrion is not the moral core of the book. There is no moral core of the book, because the perspective is traded back and forth between characters good, bad and ugly. BECAUSE of this, I find that I am able to accept a lot of bad choices and evil deeds and moral collapses performed by at least somewhat sympathetic characters as part of the story, rather than Martin hammering me with his ideas about the world.

For me, this makes all the difference in the world, and for a lot of others, it apparently makes no difference at all--they react the way I would if it were mostly the story of Tyrion (or even of the Lannisters) and he killed his mistress.

I also suspect that I am more of Martin's camp in general than many others here, although God knows, I do not want to hear him talk about it. I hate sanitized epic warfare in fantasy. I hate it when the Bad Guys are so Bad that you never have to consider them as human beings (or whatever they are). I hate it when no one ever has to make a hard moral choice with no winning answers. And I hate it when there are Great Battles Raging, but there's hardly a paragraph spent on what this is doing to the land and the people. I see that as deeply immoral, and also as having terrible implications for the way we think of war in our own world. So if that is what Martin is reacting to, he's got at least one 'Hell yeah!' from me. Mostly, though, I just read it as a giant sprawling political fantasy with well-drawn characters.

Rowen -I'm using the Shae example because Tyrion is explicitly meant to remain sympathetic before and after - he's GRRM's favourite character, he's many fans' favourite character, and people will defend him fiercely. Everyone involved with Pia is meant to be taken as monstrous. No one's going around saying we just don't understand Hoat or Gregor Clegane.

Neither of your variants (is this about misogyny / is this about murder) hit the mark. This is about misogynistic violence and how much easier it is to get away with than gender-neutral violence. This is about fictional characters using the same excuses as real-world abusers and murderers and still being considered sympathetic.

Makabit, that makes sense. I think, for me, the interesting thing is less how Tyrion is portrayed in the novel (since I haven't read it) and more the fan reaction to it. If a fan says -- as I think I hear you saying -- "He's not a good guy, but then again I didn't think he was *supposed* to be," then that's perfectly sensible to me. There's lots of characters in fiction that aren't nice people.

Heck, it would probably be very subversive if a writer could realistically show that "nice guys" do bad things and if the reader still thinks they are nice after that, the reader has some Serious Thinking To Do. That's often a basis for an unreliable narrator, even.

My reaction was on the fans who seemed to feel the Tyrion was a great guy and that the murder was totally not his fault because X, Y, Z reasons. And -- of course -- Sady's impression that the author WANTED the audience to think that.

Or, basically, what Will says. If someone thinks Tyrion isn't sympathetic but they like the books anyway, that's not really a problem for me. It's when/if someone says that Tyrion is sympathetic and in doing so, they make excuses for murder and domestic violence, that I get kind of a "whu??" cognitive dissonance moment. :)

I also view Tyrion's reaction to the slaves as a major example of his priviledge showing and not supposed to be a serious question. Well, HE might think it is, but he's been pampered his whole life.

I think of it like my reaction when my friend and I saw Ever After, back in the day when I was about 17. I got so angry during the movie and afterwards was ranting about "There's an entire household against three people (maybe even just two) who can't tie their shoes without help. Why not just lock them in the basement, or throw them off a cliff, or chase them out with pitchforks or SOMETHING and take your lives back!!!" My friend was basically, "yeah. .. it doesn't work like that.. ."

And I hate it when there are Great Battles Raging, but there's hardly a paragraph spent on what this is doing to the land and the people.

The time spent on the impacts for commoners is pretty sparse in ASOIAF as well - there's lip service, characters say that "When nobles play the game of thrones it's the smallfolk who suffer", but vastly more time is spent on the specific adventures of individuals completely removed from the common life. How many main characters gone hungry so far because a regiment marched through their area and ransacked all the food? How many of them have spent any time talking about reconstruction efforts or death tolls or the possibility of rebellion? (I recall there was a brief rebellion in one city, with limited impact on the plot or characters.) The devastation visited on the commoners is basically relevant insofar as it impacts the life of nobles who are still either waist-deep in muck on a perilous journey (and will forget about this village tomorrow) or sashaying around elegant castles ordering people about.

Again, I don't read a lot of the fan material, and I'm TOTALLY going on the reactions of the people I know, but does Martin think of Tyrion as a sympathetic character? Do you feel the same as Ana does that it's not Tyrion's actions but the fan reaction that's the problem?

Do you feel the same as Ana does that it's not Tyrion's actions but the fan reaction that's the problem?

I should clarify: I do think how it's presented in the book, by the author is important. I just can't speak to that because I haven't read it. Will, I think, has read it, so he can speak to that much more coherently than I ever could.

I think a feminist writer could do a great job with the facts as they've been outlined as a subversive, "ha, you think this guy is nice? No, he is not nice even a little bit," but I very much doubt that's what GRRM has done. That's just my cynicism showing.

Narratives are not neutral. Kit has pointed out that the narrative has bent over backward to excuse Tyrion. Sady pointed out that Tyrion is rewarded in-text with the funny punchlines and interesting storylines. This would seem to indicate that GRRM expects the PROBLEMATIC fan reaction to be the NORMAL fan reaction.

If someone like you rejects that and says "no, I didn't read it that way and I refuse to excuse Tyrion", then that's great. And IF the narrative is neutral enough to allow lots of people to do that, that's even better. But I don't know how the narrative is structured, and I additionally did not want to say your interpretation was wrong, so I recused myself from that portion of the dialogue and focused on what I had seen: the problematic fan reaction.

That doesn't mean that I don't think Tyrion's actions are bad (I do) or that they are presented well in the narrative (I don't know, but I privately suspect they aren't presented well, based on Will and Sady's commnets). It just means that I'm trying to limit what I say on the subject to what I actually know. :)

I wouldn't agree. The key characters are socially privileged, but I would say that Arya's segments in particular show the impact on the 'smallfolk' fairly graphically--and Arya is keeping score and taking names, partly on her own account to be sure, but also for them.

The chapters with Jamie and Brienne leave little doubt about what the war is doing to the region either.

I honestly have no idea what Martin thinks--I tend to stay away from fantasy authors unless I have a reason to think I will like them as people. And I don't know any ASOIAF fans except myself and my husband, and a guy I know online who suggested them. And his mother, who's seventy-eight, and is sort of freaking him out by loving the series.

I'm getting the impression from the comments here that I don't WANT to know many more Martin fans.

I think the take-away here is that it's not bad to like a series that has problematic elements. (See also Narnia, Twilight, pretty much everything else ever written.) And reasonably people will disagree on whether those elements were deliberately introduced. :)

Again, I don't read a lot of the fan material, and I'm TOTALLY going on the reactions of the people I know, but does Martin think of Tyrion as a sympathetic character? Do you feel the same as Ana does that it's not Tyrion's actions but the fan reaction that's the problem?

I can't read GRRM's mind (thank Buddha) and I don't know that he's ever explicitly stated that he is sympathetic towards Tyrion, but has has stated that Tyrion is his favourite character, and as noted Tyrion tends to get rewarded with the best lines and is in many ways 'central', being the character who comes into direct contact with the most other main characters. It certainly looks like GRRM feels that he's one of the more heroic and likeable characters.

I was able to read a lot of the series without feeling completely gross because I tend to subconsciously reject the idea that I'm supposed to take a particular unpleasant message as authoritative - it takes me a while to register that, no, it's not just that this is a conflicted character, the author thinks that these problems are actually a-okay. (See for further example: series 5 & 6 of Doctor Who, terrifying gender philosophies thereof.)

The fan reaction is a problem for me because the author reaction to the fan reaction has pretty much been to validate it. JK Rowling can take one line in an interview to say "Gosh, why do people swoon over Draco, can't they see how damaged and dangerous he is? That's not healthy!" GRRM can take five years to write a book but no one seems to have dug out a quote from any conventions where he says "Hey, guys, you all realise that Tyrion is proper @#$%ed up, right? You get that he's interesting but has done objectively reprehensible things? Okay, cool."

If I assume Death Of The Author And Also Basically The Entire Readership then the books become somewhat less problematic, and that's the mindset that I originally read them in. But that requires assuming a vastly unreliable narrator that felt decreasingly plausible the more I read.

And the rule for liking problematic things remains constant: it's fine, but don't try to hide or deny the problematic things. (If we haven't plugged Tiger Beatdown enough lately, there was a Mad-Men-related post that went into this, later on.)

Yes, he has a fan base (So do Jayne Cobb, Darth Vader, Scarface, Tim Curry in anything he does . . .)Yes, he gets witty quips (So do Jayne Cobb, The Sheriff of Nottingham, Tim Curry in anything he does, . . )Yes, he's central to the storyline (too many to even start listing)Yes, he's a favorite of the author.

But, at no point has he (or actually anyone in the series) been presented as the Good Guy who Does Good Things. I think this is more of a case of FanDumb, and a fan base that ran with a character who wasn't meant to be a How To Guide (Scarface).

Compare Tyrion's murder of Shae to, say, the treatment of Ned's POV - he's sympathetic, but the way he handles his first stint in office is clearly problematic, and those problems are highlighted across other characters' storylines and dialogue and have lasting repercussions for both the character and everyone around him. Sansa's choice to lie on Joffrey's side leads to her wolf being killed, and has lasting repercussions for her relationship to Arya, and Arya's relationship with her father, and so on. Daenerys' choice (?) to sacrifice her child for her husband has immediate consequences and has lasting repercussions on her life and those of the people around her.

The narrative tone and actions shift in response to characters' actions, often in ways that I don't agree with. (I find the implicit rebuke for Daenerys choosing her husband over her unborn child very very squicky.) Other people criticize them, or the consequences are shown to cause lingering pain for others. Not that there's no blowback for actions that are "good", but they're not highlighted in the same way.

Tyrion's choice to kill Shae . . . doesn't really change much. So I think it's worth looking at why violence against women is not treated in the same way as other bad choices. (To the point where I didn't even remember whether he *had* killed her. But I sure did remember the bit about Sansa, Arya, and Joffrey.)

I think this is more of a case of FanDumb, and a fan base that ran with a character who wasn't meant to be a How To Guide (Scarface).

Which is why I think it's relevant to look at the way GRRM interacts with his fans - those interactions to the best of my knowledge have only ever been to validate the views of the fanbase that you and I would rather dismiss as wildly inaccurate.

I just went and did some web searching but couldn't find much on how Martin morally views Tyrion, merely confirmation that he's his favourite character. There were, of course, plenty of reviews that also seem unruffled by it all (the NYT reviewer describing Tyrion as 'ribald' and 'utterly human', the character who overwhelms the rest of the story whenever he's on the page and turns it into his own personal adventure) - people will go on about never knowing who's good or evil in the story, good and evil being perspectives, but mostly it's just flat-out worship of everything involved.

Maybe witty and quips were the wrong words. Jayne is a character, that in real life, would be someone that you would NOT want to be around. At one point, he, in all seriousness, offers to trade his favorite gun for Mal's possibly not legal bride. Yet, for all of his . .. whatever, I've never seen a discussion of if Joss Whedon is a misogynist. Of course, there's PLENTY of other issues to consider here.

However, I'm not sure I accept the idea that I'm getting that because Martin hasn't apologized or chastised his fan base that that puts him into a Bad Man category. I'm also really simplifying things here.

I guess I'm less interested in classifying authors as Bad Men, and more concerned with the text. I don't care what GRRM *really* thinks of women, nor do I think I can know what he *really* thinks. But I think his work has some issues with women.

Ditto with Whedon. His work has some problems, too. (The quickest way to find some discussions is to look at discussions of Dollhouse. Daniel Hemmens is the one that pops to mind first - not that I agree with all of his points or the extent of his extrapolation to Whedon, but there's definitely criticism of Whedon's work out there. http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-394 )

Yet, for all of his . .. whatever, I've never seen a discussion of if Joss Whedon is a misogynist.

Pretty much every scene with Jayne has a, "You're not supposed to agree with this guy... ever," sign hanging over it. The rare occasions when he is heroic are times that he is pushed, for whatever reason, by circumstances outside of the usual bounds of his character.

There's never the implication we're supposed to think any of his questionable actions are justified.

I have not read the thing everyone is talking about, so I cannot say if the same is the true of it.

However, I'm not sure I accept the idea that I'm getting that because Martin hasn't apologized or chastised his fan base that that puts him into a Bad Man category. I'm also really simplifying things here.

Simplifying in turn, I'm no more concerned about GRRM's personal virtues than I am with any other individual, but the question we're debating is whether Tyrion is meant to be seen as sympathetic or not. People in this thread are saying no, people basically everywhere else on the internet are saying yes. The simplest way to determine whether he's meant to be seen as sympathetic would be to ask the author directly, but there's been no luck there. (I did come across a blog by a person who identified strongly as Christian and said, no exaggeration, that while they would normally condemn someone murdering a prostitute and then their father, in this case they wanted to cheer.)

So then we've got individual readings. I look at Tyrion being rewarded by the story and treated like the big woobie, and the rampant sexism everywhere else in the books (not just in-universe) and conclude that we're probably not supposed to look at Tyrion and think 'misogynist murderer!'

I'm only interested in GRRM's personal views insofar as it increases or decreases his culpability in producing a story that seems to bring out layers of (semi-)latent misogyny in a lot of people.

I have been writing way too much about this today and should really be finishing a report for tomorrow morning, so - on hiatus, back in future.

I think it's probably unfair to say at no point has Tyrion been presented as a worthwhile guy, not if GRRM says he's his favorite character, and other people see him presented as a favored character. This is going to be a YMMV situation: you don't see it, others do. I *think* that's what FedEx arrows are about. :)

oh, lord and lady. Don't even get me started on how Martin treats his fans. . .

On a slightly different note, Rowling's reaction to Snape reminds me of Diana Wynn Jones' reaction to seeing the movie (and highly divisive) adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle. I can't find the quote anymore (and it's possible that she never said it). But I remember reading something saying she said she realized why so many girls were in love with Howl, after seeing the movie version.

And it's hard not to interpret the whole "silliest portion of their lives" thing as a condemnation of what I do want, which pisses me off.

Re-reading the thread, I saw that this didn't get responded to, even though I meant to. :)

I like this. I like this, and I'm not even in the same boat as you, because I'm the respectable matron-type that these books tend to glorify. I'm definitely (for me) all about the marrying and the kids and things.

But I'm also not into lifestyle-choice shaming. I don't think teenagers or young adults are silly for wanting to have a good time. I don't think older people are silly for wanting to have a good time. People should have a good time however they want (as long as no one gets hurt, standard obvious disclaimers, etc.) without social shaming.

The "silliest portion of their lives" or whatever smells suspiciously like "get off my lawn"-ism where the speaker -- at whatever age they conveniently happen to be -- has reached a golden age of insight and intelligence and everyone younger is a silly person who is deliberately and obstinately being silly.

Though that did end any doubts I might have had about whether ASOIAF is Not My Thing. It is very, very, VERY much Not My Thing. There's also a disturbing amount of unexamined sexism in the fan base. Blargh.

Sorry for making everyone sad with the linky link. It was the first result on google for "tyrion sympathetic" (not counting wiki's and the like. i was looking for a forum or a blog) :(

I only got a few pages in before wandering off in disgust.

Anyway, does Ana's husband read the blog? Hi Ana's husband! Would you like to write a deconstruction for all of us to read? :) Ana does lots of deconstructing already and ASOIAF is very long and lengthy.

I went to bed an hour ago but wandered back to the internet in search of math to do while trying to sleep. i didn't find any, but now i want to crochet an abacus. o.O

Ah, sorry. Communication over the internet is always tricky. Or I've started expecting disagreement. ^_^;

On whether or not people like to read the same thing all the time, perhaps we're thinking of it to different degrees. (Or we just know very different people.) Most of the grim dark liking folks I know have no interest at all in reading something that isn't grim dark (with the possible exception of nonfiction). And, while I'll read nonfiction about things that are decidedly not light and fluffy (I have a fascination with disasters.), fiction is inspiration and escapism for me, so I've no interest in the grim dark gritty type stuff. Though I do read many different genres of fluff. But maybe all of that's exactly what you meant. (And I do know one person who alternates between grim dark and light and fluffy fiction.)

No worries about the link, I think it provided a lot of context. Just...soul bleach context.

I did a google walk of my own on Tyrion Sympathetic and was amused to find some Mark Reads style read throughs where the comments were saying that Tyrion couldn't have committed an assassination because GRRM has set him up to be such a *sympathetic character*.

No irony apparently intended.

Husband does read the blog but not always the comments, so I'll answer that writing decons isn't really his thing. He likes watching me tear things apart, but says he wouldn't have noticed the things if I hadn't pointed them out. I think he's flattered by your comment, though. :)

Crochet an abacus? If you come up with a pattern, I beg you to share. :D

it takes me a while to register that, no, it's not just that this is a conflicted character, the author thinks that these problems are actually a-okay. (See for further example: series 5 & 6 of Doctor Who, terrifying gender philosophies thereof.)

Missed this the first time through. I'd love to hear more about the terrifying gender philosophies of series 5&6 of (new, I assume?) Doctor Who. I thought series 5 was an improvement over at least some of what had come before (I liked the first season of New Who, but quickly lost interest in Ten - though I thought some of the series with Donna was good...until they completely ruined that.), but I'd heard some squicky things about series 6 and never bothered to watch it. I'm curious as to your take on the matter.

I don't know if I'd want to derail the derail into filling the Narnia thread with my breakdown of how Steven Moffat has tried to ruin the Eleventh Doctor for me, and I should be in bed anyway, but I can look again at my blog notes (the things that get added to every time I consider completely indulging in geekery and writing up a Doctor Who post) and see if I have a coherent thing to say. (Doctor Who also came up at Tiger Beatdown, so hat trick, but this is an area where I thought Sady was substantially reinterpreting some things, so I didn't agree with her conclusions so much.)

Kit quoting Sady: Dany’s overthrowing the whole Eastern continent isn’t that much different from the justifications George W. Bush gave for his wars and invasions in our “the East”: “We have to overthrow their governments to Save Them and Bring Democracy and Teach Them A Better Way because their practices are Barbaric.” That's a resemblance that I think is meant to be more than coincidental or unintended. Sady's review is based on the first four books, but it will probably surprise no one that in Book Five, Dany's war has worked out for her just as well as Bush's did for him. A few of the formerly enslaved still support her, but most of the residents resent her, the region's economy has been destroyed, civic order lies in ruins, it would take far more in money and troops to stabilize the situation than Danaerys can command, she's put herself into an impossible situation with no good solutions, everything she tries only causes more harm. Sound familiar?

That's the trouble with discussing these books. It's hard to judge an unfinished story. And maybe this whole business is meant to teach Dany what not to do if she goes back to Westeros, although that seems a little hard on the Eastern cities. Or maybe the whole thing will turn out to be extraneous, there to make a political point rather than a narrative necessity, and the whole episode could have been dispensed with in the interests of getting on with things. Or maybe there really is a good and sensible reason for this part of the story, and all will be revealed in due time...

Maybe I should just stop talking about ASOIAF until books six and seven-- eight? nine? wanna make a bet? -- are published, and then we'll see. If I live so long.

I'd probably see these terrifying gender philosophies if someone pointed them out. I just get sidetracked by, e.g, the needless waste of decades of badass memories. Rory at least vaguely recalled centuries that never happened, and he seems fine! This should be your first thought if an Alternate Future You with useful skills tells you they want to live!

to quote Making Light, you don't need to drink the whole pint of milk to see if it's sour.

or, less shorthand: if it comes across as problematic in book a, an it looks like book a is endorsing it, then book a has failed to present it right. book z might try to fix it, but that doesn't mean book a got it right.

eg: the wire. we don't know till the end who will be punished or rewarded. we do know from the first episode that the drug dealers are violent but human n the cops are corrupt n basically everyone's compromised. it sets its tone right away n carries it through.

also: with racism, consequences of war don't mean the book isn't orientalist in how it presents the brown ppl.

If that's what he's trying for, either he reads very different books from me

including different ideas bout women. medieval sexists had ideas about women as repositories of lust and/or physical filth, a la eve, or mindless bodies, a la aristotle. didn't just beat or rape women; talked about them like a separate species. in that light, actually his sexists aren't sexist -enough-.

also, lots of details feel unresearched, which flaws the medieval authenticity argument. small detail - at some point a kitchen offers lemon cakes n strawberry tarts. lemons don't grow in northern europe, which is the model, n even if you imagine a different country, they aren't in season same time as strawberries. in middle ages, if it's not in season, you absolutely can't have it; it doesn't exist. marlowe's faust gets the devil to fetch him out of season fruit; it's as improbable as resurrecting helen of troy.

when his characters' cooks have access to modern supermarkets, i suspect that authenticity is not his real passion.

if it comes across as problematic in book a, an it looks like book a is endorsing it, then book a has failed to present it right. book z might try to fix it, but that doesn't mean book a got it right.This is true, but that's one of the problems with this series. I mean, even more than most series, the books don't work very well as individuals. Don't work at all as individuals, really. They feel less like Book A through Book Z, and more like he's thinking of it as a ten-thousand-page Book. Which is getting annoying. It's all very well to be telling a Big Story, but you'd think that a thousand pages of narrative would have its own internal beginning, end, and resolution. these books don't.

They feel less like Book A through Book Z, and more like he's thinking of it as a ten-thousand-page Book.

i read a few ages ago to oblige an importuning friend, so never was a fan ... but to me they felt less like bits of one big book an more like a soap opera. nothing against soaps - heck, i have a friend who writes for them - but that does flaw the 'it changes later' defence, at least to my mind. soaps always exist in the present moment; each episode exists for its own sake.

I've never read anything that states that Martin was trying to go for historical accuracy. I know that Martin does consider himself an amateur historian, but that really doesn't mean anything in relation to these books, and it IS a fantasy series. I, for one, feel a better grasp of a "medieval" society in these books then I do in authors like Ken Follet. Plus, I have no real problems in a world where strawberries and lemons are available to the rich royal families, gigantic man-made walls of ice exist, dragons are real, and the current summer has lasted 9 years.

I'd also like to say that I get it. You don't like these books for a lot of very valid and well thought out reasons. Some of us like it in spite of those flaws. There's a lot of authors I like despite problems with world building and a very . . .um, flawed? view of gender and sexual and race relations (Hi, Anne Bishop!)

I'm getting the impression that contempt for the author/series is translating into contempt for the fans (and, honestly, there's some pretty contemptible fans out there). I know this isn't always the case, but I've seen this pop up in other online discussions and it's a hard thing to get around, on BOTH sides.

I think I've said here and elsewhere, and I think Will said as well, that it's very fine to like flawed things. :)

There's probably no book on earth that is completely devoid of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, etc. The answer is most definitely not to stop reading forever. Nor do I think the world needs a Liberal Boycott List. People should enjoy what they enjoy without guilt, while other people (or the same people!) discuss the work and its inevitable flaws.

So I do hope no fans here feel contempted at, because that definitely was not my intention. I apologize if my posts came off that way. :(

I've never read anything that states that Martin was trying to go for historical accuracy.

an if he wasn't, that's fine. it just means 'historical accuracy' is a wobbly defence of the misogyny.

Plus, I have no real problems in a world where strawberries and lemons are available to the rich royal families, gigantic man-made walls of ice exist, dragons are real, and the current summer has lasted 9 years.

personally - and just personally - i see a difference.

it's partly about levels of reality: dragons aren't real at all, so they can be done however you like, but strawberries and lemons are, so doing them wrong just feels like a mistake. if they were stoodleberries and pipdobs, that'd be dragon-level fruit and they could be in season whenever you like, but if they're real fruit n the seasons are all wrong, like i say, it feels like a lack of attention to the -feel- of life in that era, which makes it feel thin. if life is hard but food isn't subject to the laws of reality, there's a tension between apparent grit and freedom from practicality, which doesn't sit well together, at least in my mind.

n it's partly about consequences. if you have big ice walls n dragons, that's fine, as long as they have reasonable consequences. a big wall is hard to get past, so it has political effects. dragons crisp people, so they present a danger unless they can be controlled. within the world itself, they have reasonable consequences.

but if you have 9-yr summers n winters, then really you shouldn't have earth fruit at all. the longer summer would mean a completely different kind of growth season. would mean a whole different way of cooking - preserving food would be way more important, for instance - n the issue arises whether such a world could support a warrior aristocracy at all. (if yr all snowed in, battles become impractical cos travel's impossible. warrior kudos consequently goes down. people who could guard the food stores would become more valuable, cos food stores would be the equivalent of land in terms of value - no point fighting now for land you can't use for a decade.) might not matter if you don't think about it, but again, if the feel of life is supposed to be naturalistic, then that's the kind of thing i'd like an author to think about.

I had trouble with this on the first draft of my novel. It's a fairy tale set in Fictional Italy, so there's major changes to race relations and gender relations, but I wanted the fruit to be right. That was tricky - there's not a great "what kind of fruits were grown in Italy in the 1400s time frame" site that I could find.

And then one of my delightful beta readers pointed out that an all fruit diet would have some people hunched over the chamber pot for hours, so now I need Italian vegetables, too. Lettuce and beans, maybe? Olives, of course... :)

I assume (perhaps wrongly) that the vegetables with Italiany names in English are in fact Italian-origin? Broccoli, zucchini, radicchio? (I'll be amused if anyone protests the lack of tomatoes in your world.)

The winters that last years have been one of my many sticking points. How do they store the food? With our winters you have a way to reasonably know what to expect, but if winter can last anywhere from 2-9 years, how do you know what to prepare for? And how do you keep the food that long? (I have this issue with the 7 years of bumper crops in the Joseph story from the Bible, too.)

I know less about Italian vegetable history than the American/British ones, but my understanding:Many of the vegetables in Italy originate from the Middle East - chickpeas (definitely by 1500), onions, spinach, eggplant, squash, melons. Walnut oil was pressed in the north, and I think they had some almonds. They had carrots. Lots of herbs - I think more greens in general than we might expect. I suspect you'd see a pretty heavy preparation influence from the south - honeyed carrots with rosewater, parsley stuffed pasta, olive oil and beans with herbs.

I'm not sure if the general view of vegetables as peasant food (and not in a good way) was true in Italy, but 1400 is late enough that there should be some cookbooks or household texts around. (How representative they are . . . well . . . who knows.) Libro Della Cocina by Toscano is cited a lot, but I can't find a full translation. Plenty of individual recipes out there from it, like this:

“Take the tips of fresh cabbage, and boil them: then remove them, and fry in oil with sliced onion, and the white part of the fennel, and sliced apple: and add a little stock: and then serve it in bowls, and sprinkle with spices. And you can also cook it with salted pork fat, with cheese and with poached eggs, and add spices; and offer it to your lord.”

Looks like cabbage and all its relatives (kale, chard, brussels sprouts, broccoli) were a thing.

(Cabbage, pork, and apples sounds decidedly Germanic to me, but whatever. Italy was a hub.)

I'm a crochet newbie -- all I've done so far is a hyperbolic möbius strip, but there really are no patterns for crochet abacuses. I was thinking each "wire" would be yarn, and would have some knots to hold the beads in place -- the beads could slip over the knots so it would be usable as an abacus, the knots would just sort of keep them where you wanted them. And for beads, I'm not sure if I'd want real beads or to make little crochet circles/hollow balls to thread onto the yarn "wires". But I've sort of got a pattern forming in my head, and I think I could do most of what I want with the few stitches I know how to do. Always a plus. :)

I'm a crochet newbie -- all I've done so far is a hyperbolic möbius strip

For a moment I thought I had wandered into that Questionable Content strip where Hannelore talks about German knitting scientists demonstrating their nine-dimensional hypercardigan, and the rumour that Belgium has knitted a mitten that defies the second law of thermodynamics.

Seconding the yays for Rowen and Dav; I hadn't put much thought into the food my characters might be eating in my NaNovel, but now I have a nice archaic German cookbook translation to help me out.

I think you misunderstand the Whole Sansa/Arya thing. The point Martin was making is that medieval society DOES NOT adhere to rules it proclaims. Sansa is not punished simply for being "Girly girl", but for being naive. She expects the society to work just likein stories she has read. That's why she is so ladylike - this is how she SHOULD behave by those standards. The same way she is always honorable, trusting etc - this is how the rules reqire she behaves, but in the setting this leads to ruin rather than winning. Robb Stark (Sansa's father) basically made the same mistake - he always played by the rules and died because of it - so it issn't really gender related - just the form is.Arya, on the other hand understands early that playing by the rules srews you, so she does what she needs, regardless of rules. She learns t fight, even though females shoudn't. She bahaves tomboyish, since t is easier to achieve goals this way (remember, the world in "Fire and Ice" IS higly mysoginic). She also learns to backstab, kill before the opponent realises what's happening and basikcaly does whatever it takes to win - since she has no chances otherwise. THAT's why she is successful, and not just because she is a tomboy - being like a man is just another aspect of foregoing rules in order to win. So it's not "tomboy good - ladylike bad", it's "playing by the rules let you loose while doing whatever necessary to win with no respect for rules lets you win" - highly cynical, but not really mysoginic.Regarding Susan's bow, I always thought the point was "this is a weapon you can use if there is no other way, but ACTUALLY, as a girl, you shouldn't need to fight - unless the ituation is JUST THAT awry that you must stay out of battle unless you feel it's absolutely necessary". This is of course mysoginic, but not absurd. By the way, the reason bows were not that important in real life is their low PENETRABILITY. Surely a longbow (2m lon) , fired by an adult when one of the bow ends is on the ground (so it can be pulled further), could penetrate a typical armor at 100 meters, but what Susan gets is a far cry from it, and there are no words her bow is super-strong. Realistically she has a chance of hit at 20-25 meters, which is not that good against fast opponents. Shooting two Wolves (who are also intelligent and can cayn anticipate how a arrow flies) with a bow is really not probably. Same goes for battle - Susan had a huge chance of being killed without armor.

Mmm. I don't see why having an archer wouldn't be a hugely helpful thing. If the party on the road is caught by a search party, downing or injuring even one opponent before the attackers get to Peter/Lucy could save all their lives, and it could make their attackers more wary. Plus, they're going to a hill - Susan has more of a tactical advantage there.

In the later battle, the good guys will be going up against wolves, giants, hags, bad trees, dwarves, etc. - even if she can shoot a giant in the face a couple times, she'll save lives. Sure, like all archers, they'll want to put her somewhere that's not in the melee, but they're not bolstered by a real army, and every pair of hands causing damage is going to help.

So it's not "tomboy good - ladylike bad", it's "playing by the rules let you loose while doing whatever necessary to win with no respect for rules lets you win" - highly cynical, but not really mysoginic.

true, but not, i think, the whole story. when you look at all the female characters together, the fact that the punishment is sexual is also relevant. plus, the kind of naivete attributed to her in the first place is stereotypically girly.

@Kish: Without wanting to re-start the whole "just how realistic is this, anyway?" debate, although I personally do not find the idea of a culture where abuse of girls and women is common, especially in times of war and unrest, to be too much of a stretch of the imagination...anyway, what I meant was that "grim/cheerful" and "realistic/fantastic" (for lack of a better word) are two separate questions. Within either range, you can debate whether a particular work is well-written or poorly-written, but a preference for one type of setting or tone over the other doesn't imply any particular superiority. "How can you read such stuff?" is obnoxious either way.

There's plenty about Martin's work that I found problematical, even throw-the-book-against-the-wall awful, but I can't dismiss the whole thing as "horrible rape-y fantasy." (Although, as I said above, any subsection of the fandom that makes a hero of Victarion Greyjoy is a fandom that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. )

Kit: when you look at all the female characters together, the fact that the punishment is sexual is also relevant.The usual defense from Martin's fans is that horrible things happen to men too-- which is true. But it probably is relevant that for men, horrible things happen while for women, horrible-things-plus-horrible-sexual-things happen.

the kind of naivete attributed to her in the first place is stereotypically girly. And I want to say that the kind of naivete attributed to her brother Robb is stereotypically...what? What's the masculine equivalent of "girly"? We've got "manly/womanly" and "boyish/girlish," but what do you say about a stereotypical boy character that has the dismissive tone of "girly"?

Rowen: I know that Martin does consider himself an amateur historianWhen I read A Game of Thrones all these many years ago, I kept thinking, I've read this story before...oh, yeah, I read The Sunne In Splendour. Of course, when first Ned and then Robb met their untimely ends, it became obvious that this story was not going to be that story. But still, they have a lot in common. And while the Penman novel is less explicit, the women in her story are under no illusions as to their status in their society either. Right down to the woman who is locked into a tower and left to starve to death...or was that in Here Be Dragons? Yeah, I think it must have been, because Google directs to me Maud de Braose, starved in a dungeon by wicked King John.

Oh, and I forgot to say, @Kit:Soap opera. eh? I hadn't thought of it that way, but there is something to be said for that view. I didn't notice it so much in the first few books, and then I really wanted to believe that GRRM knew where he was going and had a plan to get there, but after this latest...well, much of it was enjoyable, but...to summarize it as "recap/not much happens/cliffhanger ending" is only to exaggerate a little. Just like we used to say that you only have to watch a soap on Mondays and Fridays to keep up with the basic plot. The middle part is only for hanging out with your favorite characters and being scandalized by the people you already hate.

Kit Whitfield wrote:"the 'extenuating circumstances' are *part of the problem*. [...] it's 'author works hard to make man killing/raping/abusing woman seem excusable, over an over again'."

This is why I've had to completely give up reading Dan Simmons. The "yay, literary references!" fun of the first Hyperion book gave way to more and more limited, stereotypically womanly roles being thrust upon his female characters. They all become martyrs, mothers, or sexual conduits to enlightenment for the male characters, this last being most disturbing. In Olympos (or perhaps Ilium), he took this to the extreme of a male character having no choice but to rape an unconscious woman, his semen literally being the biological key to her awakening, in order for her to impart the knowledge that would save the entire planet.

In-world, this rape was absolutely essential to the survival of humanity, but the fact remains that the entire world is fictional and purely the result of the author's choices. This is phenomenally messed up. How could and why would an author decide to write such a blatant justification of rape? Simmons writes the rapist as being conflicted about it and the extenuating circumstances he created for the scenario are about as extreme as they can get, but HE CREATED THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES. Simmons decided to justify rape. He intentionally created a scenario in which rape was required. There is no real-world reason for him to have written that fictional circumstance.

Ana Mardoll wrote:"The 'silliest portion of their lives' or whatever smells suspiciously like 'get off my lawn'-ism where the speaker -- at whatever age they conveniently happen to be -- has reached a golden age of insight and intelligence and everyone younger is a silly person who is deliberately and obstinately being silly. "

Your remark on Dan Simmons (initial response over here: WTF?!? *head explode*) reminds me very slightly of Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream yada yada where -- IIRC, and it's been YEARS -- the main character really has no choice but to cheat on his wife with another woman/robot because if he doesn't, she'll kill herself and That Would Be Terrible.

And now that I say that, I remember Asimov pulling a similar move in one of the Robots novels -- the detective has to sleep with a suicidal woman so that his, um, affection can save her from herself. Or something. It's been awhile.

My point is that sometimes it seems like authors really REALLY want their characters to do something that the readers will consider morally wrong, so the author writes a setup where everything in the in-text universe is bending over backwards to justify it. This rarely ends well, I think.

For one thing, it raises the question of why the author wanted them to commit the act. It's not just about values dissonance, or the author wouldn't have worked so hard to give justifications - unless the values dissonance is inside the author.

//Sure, like all archers, they'll want to put her somewhere that's not in the melee, but they're not bolstered by a real army, and every pair of hands causing damage is going to help. //This was done in the film. But the point is that women shouldn't fight unless it looks VERY BAD, which fits neatly with thw two World Wars - those WERE very ugly and desperate, and in Narnia, we don't get it until later.

//. plus, the kind of naivete attributed to her in the first place is stereotypically girly. //

It IS girly, but that's justified. You see the oppression doesn't just declares the oppressed inferior, it works towards making them inferior, and in gender case, this happen by creating a perception that women must adhere to society rules more than men. This outs women in what amounts a Catch-22: if they play by rules they get ripped off like Sansa), if they don't, they are antagonized much more than men who break the rules (like Arya). That means that Sansa does have a huge social pressure to be that naive and not ask relevant questions, even to herself. She also read ballads where men were sometimes cunning and clever, but women were naive and trusting, and adheres to that at first. Add to that the fact that her father was a man who puts honour before any reason (and clearly tried to instill this in his children), and we get a perfect reason for Sansa to act like she does at first.

Of course , as the story progresses, both Sansa and Arya develop, and learn to outplay the system. Sansa learns how to bend the rules without breaking tham (which is the typical way people in medieval society got what the y wanted and is thus acceptable - for both genders), while Arya learns to break the rules without getting caught, and how to win in a situation where rules don't apply. Nota also that Littlefinger had a backstory similar to Sansa's - he started as a hero wannabe and ended as major manipulator. Naivity isn't limited to girls - but they are more succeptible to it because the moral requires them to act accordingly.

In-world, this rape was absolutely essential to the survival of humanity, but the fact remains that the entire world is fictional and purely the result of the author's choices.

Ewww. But also, has anyone else read Pamela Dean's The Secret Country and The Hidden Land? They're a variation on the portal fantasy where adolescents from our world find themselves in another world, which turns out to be dreadfully similar to the country they invented in a role-playing game. Dreadfully, because the story they developed for the game keeps proceeding to its tragic conclusion (they'd been reading Shakespeare), no matter how they try to alter it.

And they're horrified at what they've created: the king has to die, to save the realm! Let's have the king murdered by his most trusted advisor, no one would suspect! Until his closest friend does suspect! The young prince will have to kill him when he finds out-- let's have a duel in the rose garden!they had hammered out the fates of others...making them what they were, sealing their doom. How dared we? they think; we didn't know what we were doing.

So I guess the point is, if you're going to create a world (and every work of fiction creates its own world), you'd damn well better know what you're doing, because you're responsible for it, and to it.

Stranger than Fiction* had something like that with an author of tragedies. Except the problem wasn't that she didn't know what she was doing, what she was doing was brilliant, the problem was that it was killing people. Good people. When she found that that one of her characters was a real person being driven towards his early end by her plotting she had to face all of the books that she had already finished.

I thought it was handled well, though the movie doesn't really have a point you can take away from it.

*The movie that convinced me that Will Ferrell is at his best when he doesn't remind me of Will Ferrell.

Simmons writes the rapist as being conflicted about it and the extenuating circumstances he created for the scenario are about as extreme as they can get, but HE CREATED THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES.

yup.

--

@Sailorsaturumon132000 - i see your point, an it's a good argument, an w another set of books i'd prob agree. i think in this case it comes back to what i said about the books not seeming to -care- about misogyny. it may or may not b essentialism, but it doesn't come across as compassionate. if u respect women, misogyny makes you angry, n these books seem not to.

in isolation, yep, the argument about those characters wld convince me (tho one of the things i liked least was s's justine-like inability to change her views of life based on experience, which was written as almost subhuman). but in these books, well, i personally feel yr interpretation is more to your credit than theirs.

eg: how do you 'make' someone inferior? more ignorant, sure, but the justine act reads as implacably, inherently inferior, at least to me. you can look at effects of conditioning, but it doesn't tend to make people weak-willed. think of rosamund vincy. will doesn't get trained out; it gets driven underground, to emerge in other ways. (can't type whole argument, so link: http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.com/2010/11/two-girls-one-sap.html)

Kit's link had a ) on the end, because discus was too dumb to figure out where the link ended and the punctuation began. Here's the correct link: http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.com/2010/11/two-girls-one-sap.html

Kit is currently injured and typing is very hard for her at the moment. The "chat speak" is a welcome way for her to minimize typing strain and still communicate with us. I'm thrilled that she's able to speak to us at all -- I'd miss her immensely if she was 100% unable to type for days and days.

A few of our posters are also not English-as-their-first-language posters. So there are quite a few reasons why someone might use non-standard English here. :)

Except Arya and Sansa are not present as Childlike / practical. They are both inexperienced / too dstraightforward in the beginning and only gradually learn to adapt as result of hardships. Conditioning doesn't make weak-willed, but it dooes make it harder to get what you want - by trapping one in behavior musters that are inferior (Sansa) - or by giving your opponent an excuse to declare you "abnormal" if you don't adhere to them (Arya).Note again that for Sansa it's a double bind - her Father INSISTED she keeps her honor above everything, and for a woman, this included trusting men, even when she actually knew better - which probably led to her forgetting how to probe what men said. Imagine that you MUST always act and behave as if you trust every man around 100% (even if their lies are easily to expose) - after a while, you also would not admit your mistrust even to yourself, and Sansa was 12 at the beginning. Arya was a rebel from the beginning, that's why she never played by the book.Returning to Narnia, the problem with it is this: Lewis was very afraid of female sexuality, while on the other hand he was assertive of gender roles. This means that he couldn't let Susan and Lucy be like the boys, yet their female behaviour scared him. With Lucy (and Jill), he found a way out by making them somewhat asexual (Lucy's biggest attraction is to Tumnus), and boyish -behaving. with Susan, he decided to make her "no longer friend of Narnia", bacause of her female tendencies. So yes, this IS and absolutely twisted situation.

delurking to say: so off-topic, but your comment reminded me a lot of Monk. It's a show about a painfully mentally disabled detective who occasionally has psychotic episodes, a guy lost in a really destructive and crime-ful city, a guy who's cripplingly lonely. But it's so funny and light and the pain of being Monk comes off more as deeply poignant than as harsh gritty reality, and honestly that's what life is like: fluffy and painful and you laugh at the pain.

my arm is broken. at the elbow. typing is difficult. i cannot lift my son and have had to move in with parents. this is one of my few current places to socialise w non-family about non-family issues. so yes.

I remember that. The author referred to male feminists as unicorns, and considered Mal's joke about duct taping Kaylee's mouth shut damning evidence of misogyny.

I like Firefly, but I see Kaylee as a problematic character.

She's a grown woman, but remarkably childlike both in her attitudes and in her interactions with Mal. She's introduced to us in a little wink-and-nod that she doesn't just like machinery, she's turned on by them. (The implication is that she is sleeping with Mal's engineer just because she wanted to see the engine room. Which is sex-positive, in a way, but it's that special kind of sci-fi sex-positive that seems to benefit the men more than the women involved.)

She's frequently rude to Simon for his failure to live up to the romantic stereotypes in her head. She's also apparently the "go-to" character for when someone needs to be threatened with sexual violence, as in the episode with the bounty hunter. And I truly hate the "shin-dig" episode where Kaylee shows up in the pink dress and woos all the men by talking about ships. (I had someone "mansplain" mid-episode to me that ALL guys totally dig that... while I was in engineering school and learning on a near-daily basis that a great many men do not like women to know more about technology than they. But, no, I was wrong and Whedon and Random-Male-Viewer-Guy was right and there was nothing more to it than that.)

I don't think Kaylee's character necessarily means anything about Whedon -- she could just be a special butterfly. But I kind of cringe when she comes on the screen on Firefly because I'm not a huge fan of the "sweet wounded little girl voice" and Mal/Jayne/whoever making her the butt of jokes and/or threats of hilarious pretend violence if the ship doesn't perform up to snuff.

Then again, I'm not a fan of NCIS' Abby always hanging all over Gibs, so maybe I just don't like the "sweet little girl employee" / "tough as nails older guy employer" dynamic much, period. It makes me uncomfortable for some reason.

I took the thing in Shindig somewhat differently. I wouldn't say it was necessarily better, just differently.

Kaylee was insulted by the higher class woman, the older guy comes over and insults higher class woman in return then (after she leaves with her sidekicks) starts talking to Kaylee. When next we see Kaylee she's regaling a group of men with her technical knowledge. My assumption was that older guy steered her to the people who would be interested in her area of expertise after he found out that that was what she was interested in.

I wasn't seeing it as, "ALL guys totally dig that," as much as, "The guy who decided he liked Kaylee more than the upper class women knew which guys would be interested."

I don't think that that sends a better message than your interpretation, but that was how I saw it and since it is fairly different I figured I'd say so.

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Not a big fan of Shindig actually. It's on my list of, "Please don't judge Firefly by this." The only thing post executive mandated tone change and precancellation to make that list. Though I did love River trying on an accent. That was almost verging on musical voice, I thought.

BaseDeltaZero, since it was my disability you were absent-mindedly complaining about, perhaps you'd like to address yr acknowledgement to me. and since it seems you actually knew n couldnt be bothered to double-check yr memory (or this site, where i'd prevously explained), i wld like an apology.

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